Latest Release

- APR 19, 2024
- 13 Songs
- Southern Nights · 1977
- Rhinestone Cowboy (Expanded Edition) · 1975
- Wichita Lineman · 1968
- Highlights From Melody Ranch Vol. 3 · 2014
- Gentle On My Mind · 1967
- It's the World Gone Crazy · 1981
- Greatest Hits · 1997
- Galveston · 1969
- By the Time I Get to Phoenix · 1967
- The Capitol Years 65/77 · 1977
Essential Albums
- Originally released in July 1975, Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy was the legendary music star’s first No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Country Albums chart. The title track, a No. 1 Country hit, remains Campbell’s signature tune. The album’s second single, “Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in L.A.),” told the story of this Arkansas boy’s life. This 40th-anniversary expanded edition features five bonus tracks, including the previously unreleased song “Quits” from the album’s session, the digital debuts of “Coming Home” and the b-side “Record Collector’s Dream,” and remixes of the album’s two singles that appeared on Campbell’s Greatest Hits collection.
- Glen Campbell said that the first time he heard Jimmy Webb’s demo for “Wichita Lineman,” he wept. He could see it so clearly: a solitary figure at the top of a telephone pole, working, dreaming—at once a picture of loneliness and stoic self-reliance, the man who belongs to no one. Campbell had originally asked for something like 1967’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” What Webb delivered, though, not only framed the convergence of pop, country, and jazz, but it also helped open a particularly American feeling that defined ballads in the ’70s: hazy, romantic, gentle but existentially troubled—a song cowboys could feel without knowing how to sing. Alongside Bobbie Gentry’s <I>Ode to Billie Joe</I> and Johnny Cash’s <I>At San Quentin (Live)</I>, <I>Wichita Lineman</I> is one of the first albums to find its way to the top of both the pop and country charts at the same time. But whereas a performer like Cash staked out space for country on its own, Campbell blends it with cabaret pop (Jacques Brel’s “If You Go Away,” “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife”), soul (“[Sittin’ On] The Dock of the Bay”), and singer-songwriter folk (“Reason to Believe”) as though home is wherever he goes. (Remember that he’d played bass for The Beach Boys on a 1964 tour and had even been asked to join as a permanent member.) During a segment on a summer replacement for TV’s legendary <I>Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour</I>, which Campbell hosted shortly before <I>Wichita Lineman</I>’s release, he says he hopes to just do a good job. The audience laughs, but you don’t sense that he’s joking. The beauty of <I>Wichita Lineman</I> isn’t just that it charts new territory, but that it does so with a naive heart.
Artist Playlists
- A legend who knocked down the borders between pop and country.
- Behold the imprint of the Wichita Lineman's mix of pop, country, and sizzling guitar.
- This golden-country legend could breathe life into a cover.
Singles & EPs
- 2011
More To Hear
- BRELAND takes a deep-dive on crossover artist Glen Campbell.
About Glen Campbell
Glen Campbell may have debuted in the early '60s as a dazzling session guitarist and singer—working for the likes of Elvis and Sinatra, and sometimes even taking Brian Wilson's place onstage in the Beach Boys—but he wound up rivaling any of his former clients as a hitmaker once he finally stepped behind the mic as a solo artist. Deploying his velvety croon as the urbane muse for songwriter Jimmy Webb, the Arkansas-born Campbell polished his early crossover smashes so exquisitely that Nashville's country purists barely accepted them. His string-laden epics, like "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Wichita Lineman," would steer the genre toward the pop dominance it still enjoys. But they were also haunting character studies that would eventually shape sounds as distinct and distant from Music Row as the thunderous power ballads of Guns N' Roses and the hushed alt-rock mystery of R.E.M. As a late-career performer, Campbell acknowledged his own encroaching mortality with astounding gravity and grace, searching for salvation in a tender hymn by punk progenitors The Velvet Underground and singing with the heartbreaking vulnerability of a man staring down life's finale.
- FROM
- Billstown, AR, United States
- BORN
- April 22, 1936
- GENRE
- Country