‘I don’t give a damn what people think any more!’ Jimmy Webb on his wild days – and writing hits for Dolly, Glen and Frank

‘Flat for 50 miles,” recalls Jimmy Webb, remembering the desolate stretch of Oklahoma that inspired his classic song, Wichita Lineman. “Nothing out there except endless railroad tracks and telephone poles. Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! He goes by. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.”

Webb immortalised the unknown telephone worker’s solitude (and imagined conversation with a distant lover) with a 1968 smash hit for Glen Campbell. “But you wouldn’t believe what some people thought it was about,” chuckles the songwriter, now a chatty, self-effacing 80-year-old, video-calling from his kitchen in Long Island. “One guy who wrote to me thought it was about a football lineman, and a woman thought the young man in the song gets electrocuted because ‘the Wichita lineman is still on the line’.”

Webb also wrote By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Galveston and MacArthur Park, all 1960s classics that remain part of the culture. Only this year, Nick Cave and Flea recorded Wichita Lineman, Guns N’ Roses played it live and in February the octogenarian, who has three Grammys, was even involved in the 2026 awards after Kendrick Lamar’s TV Off, which samples a jazz version of MacArthur Park, won best rap song.

‘I’m at an age where I don’t give a damn what people think’ ... Webb. Photograph: Kitty Williams

“Another big moment for me was when Alysa Liu skated to an Olympic gold with MacArthur Park in the background,” smiles Webb. “She sort of took me along on this wonderful skate with her. I’m very fortunate, because I didn’t know I had a future.”

He’d been “ready to hang up” his travelling shoes, “just maybe do some teaching or mentoring” when he noticed that his old friend and collaborator Art Garfunkel, 84, was booked to play the Royal Albert Hall in London. “I thought, ‘If Artie can do it …’,” Webb sniggers. So he has carried on touring and has a new, star-studded album, his first in 13 years, after producer Fred Mollin’s gentle reminder of how long it had been “hit me in the face like a cast-iron skillet”.

The album, Yours for the Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb, contains new recordings of previously unheard songs that somehow got left behind when Webb was writing “three or four songs a week, too fast sometimes, but you feel the pressure of the marketplace.” That hustle left behind a trove of lost or unfinished songs that Webb felt could be improved. “Some were turned down by an artist,” he explains. “As a young songwriter, you don’t want to put those songs with your others. You want to take them outside and bury them in the back yard.”

One such song, I Miss the Mistakes, was intended for Dolly Parton, while Webb originally penned the beautifully emotive Winter Clothes (sung with Graham Nash) for Frank Sinatra. “But as I was playing it to Mr Sinatra I was thinking, ‘Maybe this could be a little premature,’” the songwriter remembers. “He gently smiled, took a drag on his Marlboro and a shot of Jack Daniel’s and said, ‘Well, that one’s not quite baked yet, is it son?’ So I baked it all these years later.”

‘That’s the guy I want to sing my songs’ ... Glen Campbell in 1967. Photograph: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

Webb, the son of an Oklahoma Baptist preacher, started writing songs for church but he talks about his subsequent celebrated career with a childlike marvel that it happened. “This sounds like something some genius publicist would make up,” he says, “but when I was 14 or 15 I was driving a tractor in a wheat field when Turn Around, Look at Me by a young Glen Campbell came on my transistor radio. There was something plaintive in his voice. I thought ‘That’s the guy I want to sing my songs.’” Six years later, by which time Webb had cut his songwriting teeth at Motown, Campbell’s recording of By the Time I Get to Phoenix sold a million copies.

Webb vividly remembers how Campbell asked him for a follow-up. “He said, ‘I’ve got a pile of demos here and they’re all steaming crap,’” he smiles. “‘Could you write me another song about a town?’” Webb didn’t want to be known as “the guy who writes about towns” but wrote Wichita Lineman, which Campbell recorded before it was completed. “I said, ‘But Glen, it isn’t finished.’ He said, ‘It is now.’” Webb’s status as Campbell’s favourite songwriter was cemented by Galveston, an anti-war song penned during the Vietnam conflict. So how does one write a timeless classic?

“By listening to other people’s songs and trying to copy them,” Webb shrugs. “Really, I wanted to be a film director, because all I do is watch films. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting guys like Steven Spielberg and Robert Altman and have been really surprised that they were people like me. I always thought they’d have a special aura. I think I could have made films because that’s the way I see things.” Hence his many film scores, but his pop songs haven’t done too badly.

“Billy Joel used to take the stuffing out of me at the Songwriters Hall of Fame,” he remembers, and one year Joel deconstructed Wichita Lineman. “He said, ‘And I need you more than want you … that’s divorce, right?’ The audience were roaring. Then he got to ‘and I want you for all time’ and said, ‘Ultimately Wichita Lineman is about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.’ And I got tears, you know. Some people think songwriters go around crying all the time, but most of us are lone eagles. We think of ourselves as tough but we’re not immune. Songwriting is like a hospital. We see the patients and the wounds.”

‘She took me on this wonderful skate’ ... Alysa Liu celebrates winning Olympic gold skating to MacArthur Park. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Some of his greatest songs were driven by his own hurt. Breaking up with early love Susan Horton (who had already inspired By the Time I Get to Phoenix) fuelled 1967’s extraordinary, seven-minute MacArthur Park, which gave the legendary Irish actor Richard Harris a Top 5 hit (and Donna Summer a disco No 1 in 1978). “Richard and I were a perfect team,” Webb reflects of their two albums together. “He was like my older brother. Oh, the things we did. He showed me around Ireland during the Troubles. In Belfast we played in a club guarded by men with machine guns. I’d never had a drop of hard liquor before I met Richard, but before long I could have been on the Olympic drinking team.”

One night, they were in the actor’s flat in Belgravia, central London, where Harris drank so much brandy he started taking off his clothes. “I thought, ‘I’m not staying around for how this ends’, so I went to bed,” Webb grins. Hours later, he was woken up by a cab driver, returning Harris, who was by this point wearing only underpants. “The cab driver said, ‘Excuse me guvnor, I found this gentleman on the King’s Road, where he was singing.’”

Webb forged another great boozy friendship with singer Harry Nilsson, the pair even becoming embroiled in John Lennon’s infamous “lost weekend” bender. “You’d go out for a drink with Harry not knowing if you’d end up in Scotland,” Webb says, admitting that one of the downsides of reaching a ninth decade is outliving such gigantic figures in his life.

‘He was like my older brother’ … Webb and Richard Harris in 1968. Photograph: Chris Walter/WireImage

“I think about Harry twice a day, and Richard was so beyond the pale, so fearless. Sometimes, I’ll come up with a new song and for a moment I’ll think, ‘I gotta play this for Glen. Or Harry.’ And then it hits me all over again that there’s no Glen, no Harry, no Richard. But to me these people are still alive in one way or another and I think about them every day.”

Webb, who has been teetotal since 2002, still likes to smell a Guinness, but concedes that getting old means “I don’t have to agonise about everything. When I was 23 I couldn’t go on stage without a couple of Jack Daniel’s and I didn’t play my first sober show until 24 years ago, but it’s made a big difference. I’m really proud of my voice now, but I used to get a lot of criticism of my singing because I was singing in some rarefied company. I’d pitch to Mr Sinatra or Tony Bennett, then I’d come out with my little midwestern squeaky voice. So I used to imbibe to build up dutch courage. Now I’m at the age where I don’t give a damn what people think about what I’m doing …” He flashes a warm smile. “But people seem to think it’s pretty good.”

Today, Webb is one of the survivors of a golden age where hope, playfulness and stellar pop music became entwined. As a grandfather reflecting on decades on the planet, he argues that we have become obsessed with material things. “We’ve devalued some things that are really important and put other things in their place, which is symbolised by the leadership in my country. As an 80-year-old, I want this album to show the world that 80-year-old people can still be human beings. We can still love, can still feel and be sensitive to the plight of future generations, and we can be very active.”

True to his word, he’s already written songs for another album. “Turning 80 doesn’t mean we have to sit around like lumps of coal.”