One of the greatest lines in the history of American songwriting is, technically speaking, a mistake.
At least that’s what the guy who wrote it thinks.
In 1968, a young songwriter named Jimmy Webb penned a tune called “Wichita Lineman” for Glen Campbell.
The song tells the story of a lonely telephone lineman working along the endless highways of the American Plains, thinking about a woman he loves.
Near the end comes a passage that has haunted listeners for nearly six decades:
“And I need you more than want you,
and I want you for all time.
And the Wichita Lineman,
is still on the line”
It’s beautiful and heartbreaking. It’s one of those rare moments when somebody manages to put into words something the rest of us have felt but never quite knew how to say.
And Jimmy Webb wishes he’d written it differently.
I know. Crazy, right?
In a conversation with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Webb recalled that while writing his 1998 book, “Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting,” he sat down and seriously analyzed some of his early compositions for the first time.
He was horrified by what he found.
In “Wichita Lineman,” the words “time” and “line” don’t actually rhyme. They’re what songwriters call an imperfect or false rhyme.
To Webb, a craftsman who had spent decades mastering the intricacies of melody, structure and language, this was an embarrassing oversight.
He called it the most obvious false rhyme imaginable, and then he admitted something remarkable.
Had he recognized the mistake early on, he would have written the song differently.
Think about that.
One of the most celebrated songwriters of the 20th century would have rewritten one of the most beloved passages in popular music because it didn’t follow the rules.
Fortunately for the rest of us, he didn’t know any better.
And I can’t help but think there’s a lesson in that.
To appreciate the irony, you need to understand who Jimmy Webb is.
Born in Oklahoma in 1946, the son of a Baptist minister, Webb grew up surrounded by church music and the wide-open landscapes that would later populate his songs.
He was barely out of his teens when he began writing some of the most enduring music of his generation.
“By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”
“Galveston.”
“Up, Up and Away.”
“MacArthur Park.”
“The Highwayman.”
Those are just a handful.
His compositions have been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra and Glen Campbell to Linda Ronstadt, Art Garfunkel and Waylon Jennings.
Webb became the first songwriter to win Grammy Awards for music, lyrics and orchestration. He was inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
He wasn’t some amateur who stumbled into a lucky hit.
He was a musical genius whose work helped define an era.
Yet when he wrote “Wichita Lineman,” he was a young man working largely on instinct.
Campbell needed another song following the success of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”
Webb drew inspiration from memories of telephone workers he had seen along the lonely roads of Oklahoma and Kansas.
He wrote the song quickly.
In fact, Webb later explained that he didn’t even consider it finished when he sent it to Campbell’s people.
They loved it anyway, Campbell recorded it and the rest is music history.
Years later, Webb would become so sophisticated in his understanding of songwriting that he could identify every technical imperfection in those early compositions.
But here’s the thing.
His audience never cared.
Night after night, fans approached him to say that the very passage he considered flawed was the greatest thing he’d ever written.
Webb told Gross that he had been writing from instinct and emotion rather than following some carefully constructed formula.
He described it as writing from the hip and the heart.
And maybe that’s exactly why it worked.
I wonder how many wonderful things never see the light of day because somebody thought about them just a little too long.
How many books were never written because the author couldn’t get the first sentence exactly right?
How many businesses were never opened because the owner kept waiting for the perfect time?
How many apologies went unspoken because somebody spent so long rehearsing the words that the opportunity passed?
How many people have talked themselves out of something good because they were afraid it wouldn’t be perfect?
We live in a world that places tremendous value on planning, preparation and analysis.
And rightly so.
I’m not suggesting we should stop thinking before we act. There’s a considerable difference between trusting your instincts and being reckless.
But somewhere along the way, it seems we’ve convinced ourselves that every decision must be examined from every conceivable angle before we can move
forward.
Sometimes we become so concerned with getting everything right that we forget to do anything at all.
And history suggests that some of our greatest creative achievements happened when somebody stopped worrying about the rules long enough to follow an idea.
Consider Paul McCartney.
One morning, he woke up with a melody in his head.
It had come to him in a dream.
He sat down at the piano beside his bed and began working it out, initially wondering whether he had unconsciously remembered somebody else’s song.
He didn’t have any lyrics, so he used a ridiculous little placeholder about scrambled eggs.
Eventually, those nonsense words became “Yesterday,” one of the most recognizable songs ever recorded.
Imagine if McCartney had dismissed the melody because it came too easily.
Or because the original words were silly.
Or because he couldn’t explain where the inspiration came from.
Instead, he trusted what he heard, then put in the work to finish it.
That’s an important distinction.
Instinct may provide the spark, but craftsmanship still matters.
The trick is knowing when to let each have its turn.
I’ve spent much of my professional life working with words.
As a newspaper editor and journalism professor, I teach young writers to organize their thoughts, verify their facts, construct strong leads and revise their work.
Those things matter a great deal.
But I’ve also seen what happens when a writer becomes so consumed with getting the opening paragraph perfect that the rest of the story never gets written.
I’ve watched students stare at blank computer screens, convinced they have nothing worthwhile to say because they haven’t figured out the perfect way to say
it.
And I’ve done the same thing myself more times than I care to admit.
Sometimes the best advice I can offer is simply to start writing.
Put something on the page.
Get the thought out of your head and into the world.
You can clean it up later.
There’s an old saying that you can’t edit a blank page. I don’t know who first said it, but I’ve found it to be one of the truest lessons in writing.
The same principle applies well beyond journalism.
We spend so much time preparing for life that sometimes we forget to live it.
We wait until we have more money, more experience, more confidence or more certainty.
We convince ourselves that one more round of planning will eliminate the possibility of failure.
It won’t.
And sometimes, in trying to eliminate every possible mistake, we eliminate the very thing that would have made our efforts special.
What fascinates me most about the Jimmy Webb story is the difference between what the creator heard and what the audience felt.
Webb heard a technical error.
Millions of listeners heard a man trying to describe a love so deep that ordinary language could barely contain it.
The songwriter saw a flaw in the construction.
The audience found perfection in the emotion.
Both were hearing the same words.
Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of all.
We are often our own harshest critics, measuring our work against standards that nobody else is using.
We know where the seams are.
We remember the shortcuts, the compromises, the places where we settled for something less than what we originally imagined.
But the people on the receiving end don’t necessarily see any of that.
They see what we made. They hear what we said.
They experience what we had the courage to put into the world.
And sometimes the very thing we wish we could change is the thing they love most.
I don’t know whether “Wichita Lineman” would have become the classic it is today if Jimmy Webb had taken another afternoon to polish those lyrics.
Maybe it would have, but I have a hard time imagining the song any other way.
So do countless other people.
There’s a certain beauty in that.
A young man sat down at a piano, wrote what was in his heart and sent it into the world before he had time to second-guess himself.
Nearly 60 years later, we’re still talking about it.
Maybe we could all stand to learn something from that young songwriter.
Make your plans. Learn your craft. Do your homework.
But when inspiration strikes, don’t be so quick to interrogate it.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is trust your instincts, take your shot and see what happens.
Because every now and then, the thing you got wrong turns out to be the thing you got exactly right.
And sometimes, the most beautiful things in life happen when we get out of our own way.