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Last month, there was a terrific profile in the NY Times by Stephen Holden on the very special song-writer, Jimmy Webb:

Is it possible for a musician to emerge unscathed from the kind of early success enjoyed by the singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb? In the late 1960s, when he was barely 21, Mr. Webb was showered with Grammys for writing the Glen Campbell hits "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston" and the Fifth Dimension’s "Up, Up and Away." Then there was "MacArthur Park," the grandiose quasi-symphonic "cake out in the rain" popularized by the Irish actor Richard Harris and in 1978 remade into a disco fantasia by Donna Summer.

These songs established Mr. Webb -- the son of a strict Baptist minister from Elk City, Okla., who moved his family to Southern California in the mid-'60s -- as a pop music wunderkind with a Midas touch.

He's a special musician with a new CD out - finally:

Sitting in his publicist's Lower Manhattan office on a steamy afternoon recently, Mr. Webb, tall and rangy, now 63, still has a wild man's gleam in his eye. He is a marvelous storyteller with the expansive style of a rural yarn spinner, who becomes more excited the more wound up he becomes. If he is an endless storehouse of real-life rock 'n' roll adventure stories, set mostly in Hollywood and London in the late '60s and '70s, part of him is still a wide-eyed Oklahoma country boy agog with wonder at the goings-on in the big city.

This country youth is the focus of his new album, "Just Across the River" (E1 Records), a sturdy collection of his songs, some famous, some not, recorded with a dozen of Nashville's top musicians and sung by Mr. Webb with guest harmony vocalists like Billy Joel ("Wichita Lineman"), Linda Ronstadt ("All I Know"), Jackson Browne ("P. F. Sloan"), Willie Nelson ("If You See Me Getting Smaller"), Vince Gill ("Oklahoma Nights") and Michael McDonald ("Where Words End").

The profile continues:

Today Mr. Webb has the aura of a pop-country patriarch who is keenly aware of having outlived a number of his rock 'n' roll contemporaries, including two Beatles. He has five sons and a daughter, age 19 to 35, by his first wife. Recently remarried, he lives in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He is also vice-chairman of Ascap, the organization that protects musicians' copyrights.

"Jimmy's background is 100 percent Americana and rooted in gospel and country," producer, Fred Mollin said the other day. "As a boy he played piano in church and listened to his father's Ernest Tubb records. I wanted him to go back to his Oklahoma childhood of barn dances and sneaking off to hear rock 'n' roll."

And then there's Linda Ronstadt's take on Jimmy Webb:

An ardent Webb champion who recorded several of his songs on her blockbuster album "Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind," Ms. Ronstadt, reached by telephone in her home in Tucson, commented, "From a singer's point of view, Jimmy is the only songwriter in my experience whose level of craftsmanship is comparable to that earlier era of Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin." She went on to compare the colors of his harmonies to Debussy and cited the tension between his disciplined craftsmanship and his songs' "over-the-top" emotionality as one of his most compelling qualities.

Continue on with the profile. You won't be disappointed.

Oh, and while you're at it, pick up his fantastic book, "SongSmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting."

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