Jimmy Webb at 80: Lost Songs, Wichita Lineman and Surviving the Golden Age

Jimmy Webb, the 80-year-old songwriter behind "Wichita Lineman," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Galveston" and "MacArthur Park," has released his first album in 13 years. Yours for the Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb collects new recordings of previously unheard songs that got left behind during his 1960s peak.

The story behind his most famous song starts on a flat Oklahoma highway. "Flat for 50 miles," Webb recalled of the landscape that inspired "Wichita Lineman," written for Glen Campbell and released in 1968. "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."

The song's meaning still gets misread, he said in a video call from his kitchen in Long Island. One listener wrote to say he thought it was about a football lineman. A woman assumed the young man gets electrocuted, because "the Wichita lineman is still on the line."

Why the songs keep coming back

The Webb catalogue refuses to age quietly. This year alone, Nick Cave and Flea recorded "Wichita Lineman," and Guns N' Roses played it live. In February, Kendrick Lamar's "TV Off," which samples a jazz version of "MacArthur Park," won the Grammy for best rap song — an award Webb, a three-time Grammy winner, was involved with. And figure skater Alysa Liu won Olympic gold skating to "MacArthur Park."

"She sort of took me along on this wonderful skate with her," Webb said. "I'm very fortunate, because I didn't know I had a future."

What does the new album actually contain?

Producer Fred Mollin's reminder of how long it had been since Webb's last album "hit me in the face like a cast-iron skillet." The record's "found songs" come from a period when Webb was writing "three or four songs a week, too fast sometimes, but you feel the pressure of the marketplace." Some were rejected by artists, and as Webb put it: "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."

The buried songs include:

• "I Miss the Mistakes," originally intended for Dolly Parton
• "Winter Clothes," sung on the album with Graham Nash and first penned for Frank Sinatra

The Sinatra story has a punchline. Playing the song for him, Webb sensed it wasn't ready. Sinatra "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?'" Webb said. "So I baked it all these years later."

The Glen Campbell partnership

Webb, the son of an Oklahoma Baptist preacher, started writing songs for church. At 14 or 15, driving a tractor in a wheat field, he heard "Turn Around, Look at Me" by a young Glen Campbell on his transistor radio. "There was something plaintive in his voice. I thought 'That's the guy I want to sing my songs.'" Six years later, after Webb had cut his songwriting teeth at Motown, Campbell's recording of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" sold a million copies.

Campbell then asked for a follow-up, in his own blunt style. "He said, 'I've got a pile of demos here and they're all steaming crap," Webb recalled. "'Could you write me another song about a town?'" Webb didn't want to be "the guy who writes about towns," but he wrote "Wichita Lineman" — and Campbell recorded it before it was finished. "I said, 'But Glen, it isn't finished.' He said, 'It is now.'" "Galveston," an anti-war song written during the Vietnam conflict, cemented Webb's place as Campbell's favourite songwriter.

Drinking days and lost friends

Webb's breakup with early love Susan Horton — who had already inspired "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" — fuelled 1967's seven-minute "MacArthur Park." Richard Harris took it to the Top 5; Donna Summer took it to disco No 1 in 1978. Webb and Harris made two albums together. "He was like my older brother," Webb said. "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 at Harris's flat in Belgravia, central London, the actor drank so much brandy he started taking off his clothes. Webb went to bed — and hours later a cab driver woke him, returning Harris, who was by then wearing only underpants. "The cab driver said, 'Excuse me guvnor, I found this gentleman on the King's Road, where he was singing.'"

Webb also drank through John Lennon's infamous "lost weekend" with his friend Harry Nilsson. "You'd go out for a drink with Harry not knowing if you'd end up in Scotland," he said.

The cost of reaching a ninth decade is outliving them all. "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," Webb said. "But to me these people are still alive in one way or another and I think about them every day."

Why 80 is not a stopping point

Webb has been teetotal since 2002 and played his first sober show 24 years ago. He used to drink Jack Daniel's before going on stage, he said, partly to build courage when singing in "rarefied company" — pitching songs to Sinatra or Tony Bennett with what he calls his "midwestern squeaky voice." Now he says: "I'm at the age where I don't give a damn what people think about what I'm doing … But people seem to think it's pretty good."

He wants the album to make a case for his generation. "As an 80-year-old, I want this album to show the world that 80-year-old people can still be human beings," he said. "We can still love, can still feel and be sensitive to the plight of future generations, and we can be very active."

He's already written songs for another album. "Turning 80 doesn't mean we have to sit around like lumps of coal."