Jimmy Webb - Just Across The River

For his latest release, Jimmy Webb has revisited his impressive catalogue to reimagine a whole slather of his past hits as a series of duets. It's an interesting proposition, if not a daunting one. So many of these songs have had formidable success, and to attack them once again with a who's-who list of celebrated musicians, the cards are stacked against Webb from the beginning on Just Across The River.

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The friends Webb has brought in are nothing short of impressive. If you've got Billy Joel guesting on your retrospective album, it's a pretty clear sign that you've got some good friends out there. Hearing Joel is one thing, but it's Jerry Douglas weaving Dobro magic on Wichita Lineman that really brings the track to life.

Latter day Willie Nelson is just plain pleasing to the ear. So to hear him on If You See Me Getting Smaller (famously performed by Waylon Jennings) immediately stands out from the pack; it doesn't hurt that it's a great rendition, reinventing the cautious 70s piano ballad as something of a bluegrass-tinged country number.

Throughout, Webb makes no real effort to claim ownership of these songs; with so many firmly entrenched in the American songbook, they're as much his songs as they are his collaborators and countless others that have given them life. The tale of The Highwayman, here performed with Mark Knopfler, perhaps best sums up Webb's contribution to modern music. Any version of this song will draw comparisons to Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings in their seminal 1985 version as country supergroup The Highwaymen. In the liner notes, Webb recounts being asked backstage at the last minute to fill in for an unwell Cash in front of 63,000 people. Here, Webb and Knopfler play it straight and low-key, resulting in a distinct improvement on Webb's past solo versions

The album is best served with the liner notes open in front of you as you listen; with each track Webb recounts tales of friendship and nostalgia. Perhaps the perfect antidote to this digital age where music ownership ranges anywhere from an illegal download to an iTunes purchase, Webb invites you into his storied past and recounts everything from hearing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for the first time in Jimmy Winters' living room to a near-death experience in his Cessna.

At times, Just Across The River wallows in unimaginative adult contemporary; Where Words End, one of the few new compositions on the album, painfully lingers with lines like "Where Words End / That's where my love begins". The handful of tracks that Webb performs alone have a tendency of dragging as well; enjoying Galveston early on with Jimmy and Lucinda Williams is great, but doesn't really prepare you for the plodding balladry that rears its head 25 minutes later with It Won't Bring Her Back. Redeeming himself after a rough patch however for the final track is a heartfelt rendition of All I Know with Linda Rondstadt.

Just Across The River is certainly an adventurous retrospective album; one could be content to release it as a compilation of past recordings or new versions by old friends. That Webb injects his own sensibilities into the songs he penned is definitely an appropriate capstone on a career that continues to flourish, but Just Across The River is just slightly too uneven across the board to really work.