Jimmy Webb – Twilight Of The Renegades
Twilight Of The Renegades begins with the sound of the sea, but Jimmy Webb’s piano sets a course closer to Procul Harum’s “Salty Dog” than to Frankie Ford’s rockin’ “Sea Cruise”. Leading with a song about painter Paul Gauguin searching for paradise but “never at home in this world,” Webb takes us further on the journey of self-reflection that continues to be his life’s work.
In the late ’60s, he wrote several stand-alone masterpieces in rapid succession — “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, “Galveston”, “Wichita Lineman”, “MacArthur Park”, and more. So when, on “Skywriter”, he sings, “I’m tired of chasing vapor trail ghosts in the sky,” one wonders if Webb is referring to the daunting ghost of his own legend. He isn’t. While he painfully sings, “I can’t forget you yet, for whatever that’s worth,” he sounds like a ghost that is trapped between two worlds desperately trying to haunt a heart that has long since moved on. Although he uses the skywriter’s plane as metaphor, the pilot could be a distant cousin of Webb’s solitary Wichita lineman.
Like Shakespeare’s sonnets, Twilight Of The Renegades delivers tortured meditations on the fleeting nature of love and the destructive power of time. “Time Flies” and “How Quickly” observe how we can’t enjoy good things when they happen, missing the good times we never really had once time and opportunity do slip away. At the same time, in the poetic valentine to beauty “She Moves And Eyes Follow”, Webb sings with the perfect balance of wonder and yearning” “She goes, and light follows/Those who have stayed see the room fade and go bare.”
The album closes back at sea with the haunting “Driftwood”. The renegade waits for his landlocked soul to be freed and set adrift where the current will take him, floating along with the tide now instead of going against it. Webb is a giant still doing ambitious projects that have little to do with the pop marketplace, but absolutely everything to do with real life and eternal mysteries.