Send "Glen Campbell " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Recently, Glen Campbell received the kind of diagnosis that everyone of a certain age dreads: Alzheimer's. Before the disease grows worse, he decided to record one final album and launch one final tour, and while most celebrity retirements seem suspect (ahem, Jay-Z, Patrick Wolf, Ryan Adams, and on and on), this one really does feel permanent, which is tragic. Campbell has had one of those impossible careers that sound more like the stuff of outrageous fiction than rock biography: An Arkansas native and music prodigy of sorts, he moved to L.A. and played in a band called the Champs (Tequila!) and worked as a member of the infamous Wrecking Crew, a group of studio musicians who backed Elvis Presley and Simon & Garfunkel and played on Phil Spector's infamous wall-of-sound recordings. That's him laying down licks on Pet Sounds, while he was a touring Beach Boy. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he scored huge hits with "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (both by Jimmy Webb, long overdue for a retrospective). Often dismissed as a practitioner of slick country-pop, he favored florid strings, stately vocals, and an interpretive approach most likely informed by his experience as a sideman. "Rhinestone Cowboy" pretty much sums up the contradictions of his music, which is simultaneously country but urbane, slick but still soulful.Perhaps because he was a Nashville outsider but not a Nashville outlaw, Ghost on the Canvas sidesteps all the current conventions of country farewell albums, a growing subgenre that found its apotheosis in Johnny Cash's later recordings and Kris Kristofferson's recent pair of affairs-settling records. This is no tastefully solemn acoustic affair, with a hushed tone communicating a kind of easy-read mortal gravity. Instead, Campbell conveys a certain nostalgia for that defining sound of his prime-- or at least a nostalgia for a time when that sound was popular. "It's Your Amazing Grace" and "A Thousand Lifetimes" deploy the same tricks he's been using for decades-- those ornate string arrangements and prominent guitar themes that recall fellow Wrecking Crew member Jack Nitzsche-- but they sound fresh on these tracks, even at times adventurous. The short, instrumental interstitials are distracting as Campbell tries to cover every corner of his history, but the the presence of Billy Corgan, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, and all the Dandy Warhols on Ghost suggests that the influence of this style has been, at the very least, broad....full text |
| Independent |
| Stricken with Alzheimer's, Glen Campbell has announced that this is to be his final album; and there's a profound valedictory tone about it, as songwriters such as Jakob Dylan and Paul Westerberg craft material custom-built for Campbell's situation. Westerberg's title-track and "Any Trouble" bluntly confront the inevitable, with references to "standing on the threshold of eternity" and "I won't be here long" couched in arrangements that recall the halcyon days of "Wichita Lineman"; but Campbell's own compositions are similarly "My Way"-esque reflections on a life fully lived. It's some measure of the respect in which he's held as a guitarist that celebrated six-string stylists queue up to trade breaks with Campbell, most notably on Teddy Thompson's "In My Arms", featuring surf legends Dick Dale and Brian Setzer....full text |
| Bbc |
| Rehabilitating the sound and vision that created a musical legend – let’s call it the Johnny Cash American Recordings model – is now standard practice for artists in their advanced years. The latest recipient is Glen Campbell, whose first ‘renaissance’, 2008 covers album Meet Glen Campbell, was intermittently great, and strangely disconnected (knowing committed Christian Glen was singing The Velvet Underground’s Jesus straight was an especially weird, if compelling, sensation). But guided again by producer Julian Raymond, former vice president of Capitol Records, home of Campbell’s finest recordings in the late 60s, Ghost on the Canvas is the real deal, musical and emotionally true and sometimes devastating, on a par with Cash’s performance on Hurt. It turns out Campbell has early stages Alzheimer’s, and Raymond’s lyrics for the album’s five co-composed songs were based on comments the singer made while recording the previous album. In other words, we finally get to meet Glen Campbell. He may be 75 and a frail ghost of his former hell-raising self, but vocally Campbell still sounds surefooted, hitting wistful, golden notes. The contributing cast of ‘stars’ supply unerring melody and no small amount of emotional triggers. Take the title-track, written by Paul Westerberg (The Replacements), full of the same aching longing that distinguished Campbell’s impeachable Wichita Lineman. Westerberg’s other offering, Any Trouble, appears to have Gentle On My Mind on its mind. Raymond/Campbell’s A Thousand Lifetimes also appears to tap Wichita Lineman without feeling manipulative. The DNA of The Rest Is Silence, one of six instrumental interludes, is pure Beach Boys, recalling the time guitar-for-hire Campbell worked on Pet Sounds and was Brian Wilson’s stage stand-in during the same era. This is history in the re-making. But Ghost on the Canvas isn’t simply nostalgic. There’s No Me… Without You, Strong and Teddy Thompson’s In My Arms (surely the gutsiest track Campbell has ever cut) are aimed at Campbell’s wife Kim, who saw him through his alcohol and cocaine addictions that blighted his 70s. There’s No Me... which closes the album, has its own coda of elegant, elegiac guitar solos from Billy Corgan (The Smashing Pumpkins), Brian Seltzer (Stray Cats) and Rick Nielsen (Cheap Trick), which says more about Raymond’s little black book than Campbell, but collectively they hit the mark....full text |
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