Jimmy Webb took a wrong turning in the early 1960s: the writer of some of the most memorable works in popular music's canon, including By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Galveston and the downright weird MacArthur Park had a choice to make about 35 years ago. Broadway or Bob Dylan? Andy Williams or The Beatles? Webb opted for the middle of the road, and sadly this most gifted and idiosyncratic songwriter found himself confined to hotel lobbies and lifts when the stuff he was writing was every bit as enigmatic and deep as Strawberry Fields. It's only in the last few years, with the young people championing "lounge music" and the whole easy-listening genre, that Webb has become rehabilitated. "It's great to be back," he chuckles, "all of these strange indie bands are now covering my songs and discovering my back catalogue. Have you heard of a really radical band called Urge Overkill? Well, they're playing my stuff now. I guess this happened to Burt Bacharach when Oasis started doing him. It sure feels strange, and it'll be nice to get some groovy young people at my gigs."
Sadly, Jimmy doesn't seem to be totally entering into the spirit of the 1990s music. "My favourite modern-day composers are Paul McCartney and Billy Joel, and I really like Sheryl Crowe and Marc "Walking in Memphis" Cohen," he says. Get real, Jimmy - what about drum'n'bass and The Prodigy and Radiohead? "Oh, I don't know about all that new stuff; but I do like the groove and the energy of The Prodigy and Radiohead, though I kinda miss the grainy pulling chord structure like you get on Joni Mitchell's first album. And the lack of harmony these days! But you know, I don't want to ossify and become a boring old fart - so I do listen to new music continually. But things sure have changed."
They really haven't, though: one of the coolest things any postgrunge band could do is a cover version of Webb's Up, Up And Away (In My Beautiful Balloon) and not in an ironic sense. Similarly, like Brian Wilson, any of today's movers and shakers will testify to Webb's songwriting brilliance. Songs like The Moon's A Harsh Mistress, If This Were The Last Song and All I Know have a trans-generational appeal, and the prospect of seeing the man who wrote MacArthur Park sing it live on stage is ensuring that his current European tour is selling out rather briskly indeed. Strange, though, that the people currently responsible for marketing and promoting him are concentrating their advertisements - in Britain, at least - in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail when they would work equally as well in the Face or Loaded.
Tied in with the gigs, Webb is also drumming up support for a recently-released compilation of his work, ingeniously titled And Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain, which features all his hits covered by some very stellar names. There's also a book coming out in a few months called - rather cumbersomely - An Insider's Look at the Art of the Song- writing. So how do you write a great song, then? "It's a lot easier than people think [laughs]. Doing the research for the book I interviewed songwriters like Leiber/Stoller, Goffin/ King and Bacharach/David - all the greats, basically - and it all comes down to melody. People often ask me about melody and its function, and I always say it's easy: you either move upwards, move downwards or stay where you are with the notes. If you choose the last option, the only thing you have to decide is how long to stay there. "Melody is seen as an arcane subject, difficult to penetrate, and there's always mystery and mystique surrounding it. But it's not sleight of hand, it's there to be used and manipulated. Just think of the real greats - someone like Brian Wilson, who is one of our generation's primary contributors to the tradition of melody."
Lyrics count too, of course, and in Jimmy Webb's case his words locate him more in the Leonard Cohen than the Andy Williams camp. If Burt Bacharach reflected the swinging sixties in his lyrics, Jimmy Webb was his alter ego; melancholic, troubled and perpetually suffering from unrequited love. The son of a minister, he was born and raised in a small town in Oklahoma and the empty landscapes of his upbringing continued to inform his lyrics long after he had moved to California and set up his own solo Tin Pan Alley operation. His songs are populated by love's losers, not so much the melodramatically heartbroken but rather the stoically spurned who keep throwing themselves back into the ring - as in Galveston and Wichita Linesman.
"Because my first big international hit was Up, Up And Away, people always saw me as a bit inconsequential lyrically [which is fair enough, considering a lyric like "up, up and away in my beautiful balloon"] but it's not the case. I think there's a maturity and a sanity in the way I deal with relationships in my lyrics. And really I think the reason these songs are still popular 30 years down the line is because they are middle of the road and that is where the majority of people live, in an emotional sense. "There's also a huge appetite for the dark side, the sad and the melancholic, and I suppose people find that in my songs. What I do lyrically is, I function like a virus. Let me explain: a good songwriter will locate those emotional receptors which are common to most people. He/she will then lock in to those receptors and become adaptable. The only question then is, how to locate those receptors which are common to all human beings?
All very edifying, Jimmy, - but the question that really needs to be asked here is, what are the lyrics to MacArthur Park about? I mean, "Someone left the cake out in the rain/I don't think that I can make it cos' it took too long to bake it and I'll never have that recipe again" - what's going on there? "I always think that whatever is art, need not and should not be explained, as someone once said. "But I'll tell you: MacArthur Park is clearly about a love affair ending, and the person singing it is using the cake and the rain as a metaphor for that. OK, it may be far out there, and a bit incomprehensible, but that is what I was trying to get at. I suppose the whole thing was that I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day. It was written around about the same time as Strawberry Fields, so it probably seems a bigger deal now than it was back then. Still, the lyrics never stopped Richard Harris, Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer and any number of trash garage bands from doing it - and who else can say that about one of their songs"?
Jimmy Webb plays The Arts Theatre, Belfast on Sunday March 22nd and The Olympia Theatre, Dublin on Monday March 23rd. A compilation album called And Someone Left The Cake Out In The Rain is now available on Polygram. Jimmy Webb's book about the art of songwriting will be published by Hyperion in July.