The Jimmy Webb Music Company

Jimmy's new album, Twilight Of the Renegades, his first in nearly a decade is now available worldwide. Twelve classic Webb songs that rank among his very best. This page contains a special album preview containing four complete tracks, track listing, links to purchase and reviews. We think you'll agree with the critics that Twilight Of The Renegades is perhaps Jimmy's crowning achievement in his legendary recording career.

Track Listing:

01. Paul Gauguin in the South Seas
02. Skywriter
03. Why Do I Have To...
04. Class Clown
05. Spanish Radio
06. Time Flies
07. How Quickly
08. High Rent Ghetto
09. She Moves, And Eyes Follow
10. Just Like Marilyn
11. No Signs of Age
12. Driftwood

Jimmy's new album, Twilight Of the Renegades, is one of the years best received albums, having won rave reviews from critics worldwide. Read some of the reviews below and stay tuned as we add more as they come in:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Grade: A-
The complex harmonies and lyrics of romantic regret on Twilight of the Renegades should turn these soaring ballads (from Jimmy Webb's first album in nine years) into cabaret standards. None of these will upstage Webb landmarks like ''MacArthur Park'' or ''Wichita Lineman,'' and his husky voice is a serviceable but not ideal vehicle for his own challenging melodies. Still, Webb's meticulous craftsmanship makes this an album of rare elegance, grace, lushness, and bittersweet maturity.
Reviewed by Gary Susman

USA TODAY
***+
No living songwriter has been covered by a wider array of great singers than Webb, whose classics include Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get to Phoenix and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. But Webb's own vocals, while not as technically proficient as those of his best-known interpreters, uniquely capture the wistful romanticism that seeps through his haunting melodies and lyrics. Tracks such as Paul Gauguin in the South Seas and Class Clown may flirt with sentimentality, but Webb's purity of heart and spirit transcend it. 'Some people say I'm losing touch with harsh reality,' he sings on Skywriter; they should be grateful that a few such dreamers still exist.

Hartford Courant
The many hits he's written – from "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" to "The Highwayman" – are known throughout the pop world. But a far less familiar recording sounds like it might have been a primary inspiration for Jimmy Webb's new album. "Ten Easy Pieces," released in 1996, found Webb pulling off a nearly impossible trick: He reclaimed his own standards with just voice and piano and in some cases offered definitive versions. The confidence of that disc has carried over, nearly a decade later, and so have the sophisticated melodies and craftsmanship of his salad days.

Opening with its most ambitious composition - the nearly seven-minute "Paul Gaugin in the South Seas" - "Twilight of the Renegades" is once again wisely centered on piano and Webb's comfortable vocals, with tasteful rock arrangements (see "High Rent Ghetto") uncannily recalling the sound of his underrated '70s solo albums.

A listen to this meditation on art and aging – and it will take several hearings for its complexities to unwind themselves – reminds you we're really living in the twilight of pop classicists like Webb. Bask in this moment of daylight while it shines.
- Dan Leroy

The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
***** (out of five)
It takes a few listens to register its soulful riches, but once the new Jimmy Webb collection gets inside your head, it's there to stay. Three of the songs previously appeared on the 2003 recording he produced for Michael Feinstein, and he brings them alive in a way the bland Feinstein can't. A couple of recent compositions: the others he's kept to himself for a few years. This is an album fuelled by the yearnings of the heart and shaped by the artistry of one of the world's great tunesmiths, who also happens to be an astute storyteller. Others might sing Webb's compositions, but no one sings them like he does: the innovative phrasings, the dramatic colour, the impeccable arrangements. Twelve years have passed since his last recording of new songs (1993's Suspending Disbelief) and its been well worth the wait. A haunting masterpiece.

The Australian
***** (out of five)
From the first soothing rush of ocean at the shores of Jimmy Webb's dense, multilayered brushstrokes on Paul Gaugin in the South Seas, it's clear one of the greatest songwriters of the modern era drinks from a source as deep as it is rich. Twilight of the Renegades, the new offering from the man who has a chapter all to himself in the great American songbook – think Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Gavelston, MacArthur Park, Up, Up and Away – is Webb at his peak. You just can't teach someone to do this stuff. Like he says of Gaugin, "the reason few are chosen is 'cause a few will pay the price/so you gotta keep searchin' for paradise." There is so much to discover and to ponder here: his ode to Marilyn Monroe (Just Like Marilyn) or the beautiful She Moves and Eyes Follow; the pained Skywriter and the epic Driftwood. One to be savoured.