There has always been something entirely inexplicable about songwriting. It's a bizarre and lonely act - driven by an impulse that even those who do the writing seldom understand. Certainly there's a technical side which involves the actual mechanics of music itself - melody, harmony and so on - but beyond that, the crafting of songs remains, as Toyah Wilcox once put it, "a mystery."
Songwriters go about it in many ways. Some guard their gift with ferocity, others, in need of completion, must yield and collaborate with another. Some hang around and wait for the muse to fall through the ceiling, others graft from morning to night. Some write songs as a kind of personal diary, while others knock them off strictly on demand. Love, death or supermarket promos -it's all the same to them.
But, whatever the method, a song begins as almost nothing. In skilled hands, it might become something extraordinary - fashioned, turned, written down, recorded, performed, sold, re-learned, re-played, rerecorded and re-hashed. It might even become something vital - either to an individual or to an entire society or culture. And still nobody, especially songwriters, seems to know very much about it.
So, armed only with obvious questions, I talked to Jimmy Webb, one of the most successful writers in popular music. Born in Oklahoma, Webb started early. He was hailed by Sammy Cahn as "a real genius" and Sinatra described his song, By The Time I Get to Phoenix - he had written it before he was 20 - as the best torch song ever written. Among the other hits on the Webb CV are Wichita Lineman, Galveston, Macarthur Park, The Highwayman, Didn't We, If Ships Were Made to Sail, and Up, Up and Away. So we can assume, quite correctly, that Jimmy Webb knows what he's talking about.
"I wrote my first song when I was about 13 years old. It was called It's Someone Else. It was very, very sad. I'd seen my best girl at the Dairy Queen with another guy and so I came up with this song. It actually was a song - it had a verse and a chorus and a middle and everything. Eventually it ended up being recorded by Art Garfunkel, who has literally listened to every song I have ever written. So then I began to compare my songs to songs I would hear on the radio and say, well, mine is almost as good - or comparable at least. Then the day came when I was listening and I said, well, my song is better than that."
And so that initial impulse, as in most things, was to do with love, loss, hurt, loneliness, anger, jealousy, and misery. Then, having discovered that he could do it, he kept doing it. But, if Jimmy Webb's first song was provoked by the feelings listed above, what was going on in his head when he wrote his first big hit - a song which begins with the lines "Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon"?
"Well, Up, Up and Away was pretty much a trifle. But I've written all kinds of thing in my career and on diverse subjects - ecology, economy, political subjects and sociology. But it just seems that the songs that have come to the attention of the public, and have been recorded most seriously and been given the most weight, have been the sad ones. I think the public has an appetite for sad music. I don't know what that says about us culturally as human beings. I think it's unfortunate if sadness is really the language we speak - but it seems that we all have that in common."
Another odd factor is that there are some people who write songs and yet they themselves can't sing for toffee. Jimmy Webb can sing but, that said, his success has been largely down to the fact that other people have recorded his songs - artists like Glen Campbell, whom Webb considers the foremost interpreter of his work. But if songwriting is, at least initially, such a personal thing, how does the song written at the piano in the Webb house end up with another voice entirely? Or is that other singer somehow in the room right from the from the start?
"I remember one time I wrote a song that I thought would be perfectly splendid for Waylon Jennings. I could actually hear his voice in my head as I was sitting at the piano - not my own thin, wavery voice. I thought that this was the most natural casting ever and I sent the song off to Waylon Jennings. About a year later it was recorded by Amy Grant! That's my level of accuracy! I've been singularly unsuccessful at targeting singers."
At this point in a song's life, huge questions of professionalism are asked of any songwriter. The song is written and, if it's a good one, the writer is justifiably proud of his or her creation. Surely, for Jimmy Webb, the temptation exists to keep his art for himself? There must be occasions when he is extremely reluctant to let his creations go - however lucrative it might be to do so.
"I'm always happy to be recorded by someone else. But there have been times when I've been planning a solo album and I've been really cherishing songs. I've been saying, boy that's going to fit so nicely on my own record that it might even be the title song. Maybe I have even used it as a focal point of a record and built the entire record around it. Then someone like Linda Rondstat, or someone of that nature, says, `Oh I'd love to record that!' When that happens, I have just a moment of jealousy where I'd think that I didn't want to give the song up. Maybe even that I didn't want to hear it on the radio or even for it to be a hit. It's totally irrational, I know."
That song, once gone, is entirely out of the songwriter's hands. Out in the world, it will make friends of its own, develop numerous bad habits and, if it ever comes home for the weekend, its daddy might not even recognise it. And then there are those terrible moments when a songwriter might hear his or her song on the radio and be very far from chuffed.
"Our art is really a producers' medium, and one of the things a record producer can do is take your song and do it an entirely different way. If you listen to the way I do Galveston, it comes across as a lament - it's almost Celtic. That's the way it was born, and that's the way I did it. When Glen Campbell got a hold of it, it was sped up until it almost became like a march and almost began to sound cheerful. Somehow or other the lyric, which is patently anti-war, seems to take on some kind of vibe that says, yeah, let's go out and fight! The snare drums rolling away and this snappy martial tempo changed everything around in a very mysterious way. I think that was one of my first experiences of realising that the producer does have tremendous power over your work once you surrender it."
Another strange thing about songwriting. Jimmy Webb had never even been to that particular Texas town. But, having made the place famous, the delighted mayor quickly invited him to lead the parade at the town's Annual Shrimp Festival. And so Webb found himself sitting (beside the Shrimp Queen) on top of a '57 Cadillac. He waved politely and nervously at the curious citizens of Galveston. They cheered loudly and bombarded him with prawns. Toyah Wilcox was right.