No artist waits 40 years to introduce himself, so the title of
Glen Campbell's 2008 album,
Meet Glen Campbell, can be taken with a grain of salt -- unless it's seen as a way to introduce
Campbell to a new, younger audience, which certainly seems to be the intention of this record, as it finds the countrypolitan crooner abandoning the bland professional songwriters he's relied upon in the '80s and '90s and turning to newer rock & rollers. That these younger rock & rollers include
Tom Petty and
Jackson Browne should give some indication that this isn't quite as daring a move as it may initially seem, even if
Campbell does cover
the Replacements here, but daring isn't the name of the game on
Meet Glen Campbell and thankfully neither is irony, as this never succumbs to the cringing camp of
Pat Boone singing metal. Thanks to producers
Julian Raymond and
Howard Willing -- who enlist the help of plenty of modern pop thoroughbreds, including Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. and
Jason Falkner of
Jellyfish and
Cheap Trick's
Robin Zander --
Meet Glen Campbell evokes the soft, warm haze of his classic '60s and '70s, when he turned
Jimmy Webb's eccentricities into pop standards. Although they do make slight concessions to modernity on the rhythm tracks of
Travis' "Sing" and
Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" (also tellingly the two weakest songs on this brief album),
Raymond and
Willing use "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" as their touchstones, picking songs that lend themselves to evocative melodrama, which generally means rich, elegiac ballads from
Paul Westerberg's "Sadly Beautiful" and
U2's "All I Want Is You" to
Jackson Browne's "These Days," a song so perfectly suited for
Campbell's voice it's a wonder that it never popped up on one of his LPs in the early '70s. Then again,
Meet Glen Campbell is filled with small wonders, including how
the Velvet Underground's "Jesus" is given a delicate acoustic treatment and how
the Foo Fighters' "Times Like These" bears an arrangement that consciously echoes "Galveston" and is all the better for it. This reverence for
Campbell's greatest work is what grounds
Meet Glen Campbell, as it shows a deep understanding of what made those recordings work as pop records as well as an understanding of what a terrific interpretive singer
Campbell is at his peak. For too long,
Glen Campbell has been wandering away from these strengths, singing anonymous songs in sterile settings, but here he has the right production and an exceptional set of songs, all adding up an album that is alluringly out of time, caught somewhere between the '60s and the '90s, illustrating how enduring
Campbell's sound really is. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine