Glen Campbell's finest album brings together again the singing/writing team of Campbell and Jimmy Webb that produced four Top 40 hits in 1967-69—"By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston" and "Where's the Playground Susie." In this inspired reunion, Campbell sings eight recent Webb songs, plus Lowell George's "Roll Me Easy" and Susan Webb's lovely "About the Ocean." Against Webb's excellent arrangements of his own material—beautiful string charts billow behind intricate pianism—Campbell delivers the strongest vocals of his career. While his version of Webb's great "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" can't match Joe Cocker's for raw expressiveness, he addresses the song with a compassion that is almost as persuasive. The album also offers what I think is the first recorded version of "Adoration," one of the most musically sophisticated and psychologically complex songs in the Webb canon. Campbell masters the difficult musical phrasing and gives an affecting realization of the lyric, which portrays a lover's vanity. In the liner notes, Campbell writes of Webb: "He marries a lyric with a melody and a melody with a chord progression better than any writer today." Campbell is not far off the mark. (RS 177)

STEPHEN HOLDEN