Song of the Day 10/24: Glen Campbell, “Wichita Lineman”

This song contains a not-quite-rhyming couplet that many people consider, in the words of British author Dylan Jones, “one of the most exquisite romantic couplets in the history of song.” Jones has written an entire book about what he calls “the world’s greatest unfinished song.”

Jimmy Webb wrote it at the direction of Glen Campbell, who had recorded Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and asked the 21-year-old songwriter for another song about a city. When Webb balked, he said, “well, something geographic.” Webb drew on an image he recalled from years before while driving through rural Oklahoma — a long line of telephone poles with a lone lineman atop one of them, talking to someone on a phone. “I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings’.”

Campbell had already begun recording the 1968 LP that eventually bore the title of its lead single, and producer Al DeLory was impatient for Webb’s composition. All Webb had finished, though, were two short verses — no middle eight, no third verse. They asked him to send it anyway. A couple of weeks later he ran into Campbell and, when he said, “I guess you guys didn’t like the song,” Campbell responded, “Oh, we recorded that.” When Webb protested that it wasn’t finished, Campbell said, “Well, it is now.”

Legendary Wrecking Crew bassist Carol Kaye — that’s her on the six-note intro — got it right away. “We knew that this tune was special. When he started singing, the hair stood up on my arms and I went, ‘Woah, this is deep’.” Campbell himself said he cried the first time he heard it, on Webb’s demo tape.

The couplet that makes the song unforgettable is the last one: “I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.”

“It’s a heartstopping line, and no matter how many thousands of times you hear the song, no matter what it means to you, it does not lose its impact,” journalist Michael Hann wrote when Campbell died in 2017. “I hear people hail [it] as the perfect summation of love, but to me [it] seems something sadder and more profound. … The couplet encompasses the fear that those who have been in relationships do sometimes struggle with: good God, what happens to me if I am left alone?”

For a long time, Webb didn’t understand what the fuss was about. He initially considered it “the biggest, awfulest, dumbest, most obvious false rhyme in history.” It wasn’t until he started performing that he changed his mind. He told Jones,

People would come up to me and say, “How did you write that line?” And I would say, “Excuse me?” And they would say, “How did you write that line, ‘I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time’?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It felt right, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I was trying to express the inexpressible, the yearning that goes beyond yearning, that goes into another dimension, when I wrote that line. It was a moment where the language failed me really. There was no way for me to pour this out, except to go into an abstract realm, and that was the line that popped out. I think the fascination comes from the fact that it just pushes the language a little bit beyond what it was really meant to express, because it could be deemed perfectly nonsensical — “I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time.” I mean, those are all abstract concepts, all jammed up together there. But that’s because it’s trying to express the inexpressible.

Webb recorded the song himself several times, most notably on his 1996 album “Ten Easy Pieces.”