When Jimmy Webb talks about Motown, he doesn’t discuss chart positions or studio methods. He talks about an training. In his phrases, he had “the tutorial expertise of my life at Motown,” and all of it revolved round one deceptively easy query the writers and producers there requested again and again.
“Yeah, however the place’s the message?”
Motown pushed him to assume past chord progressions and melodic aptitude. The emphasis was all the time on what you might be carrying within the music. What’s the emotional payload? What would you like the listener to stroll away with? Till that was clear, nothing else mattered.
Jimmy mentioned he took that problem “very, very critically,” and it by no means as soon as let him down. He doesn’t declare to have written the best songs in historical past, but he factors out one thing important. By and huge, his songs have an A B C construction, a starting, center, and finish. They’re tales, absolutely shaped, with someplace to go and one thing to say.
That was the Motown mindset. Not simply hooks. Not simply grooves. A message. A narrative. A journey.
And that lesson formed Jimmy Webb for all times.
