Recently, Glen Campbell received the kind of diagnosis that everyone of a certain age dreads: Alzheimer's. Before the disease grows worse, he decided to record one final album and launch one final tour, and while most celebrity retirements seem suspect (ahem, Jay-Z, Patrick Wolf, Ryan Adams, and on and on), this one really does feel permanent, which is tragic. Campbell has had one of those impossible careers that sound more like the stuff of outrageous fiction than rock biography: An Arkansas native and music prodigy of sorts, he moved to L.A. and played in a band called the Champs (Tequila!) and worked as a member of the infamous Wrecking Crew, a group of studio musicians who backed Elvis Presley and Simon & Garfunkel and played on Phil Spector's infamous wall-of-sound recordings. That's him laying down licks on Pet Sounds, while he was a touring Beach Boy. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he scored huge hits with "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (both by Jimmy Webb, long overdue for a retrospective). Often dismissed as a practitioner of slick country-pop, he favored florid strings, stately vocals, and an interpretive approach most likely informed by his experience as a sideman. "Rhinestone Cowboy" pretty much sums up the contradictions of his music, which is simultaneously country but urbane, slick but still soulful.
Perhaps because he was a Nashville outsider but not a Nashville outlaw, Ghost on the Canvas sidesteps all the current conventions of country farewell albums, a growing subgenre that found its apotheosis in Johnny Cash's later recordings and Kris Kristofferson's recent pair of affairs-settling records. This is no tastefully solemn acoustic affair, with a hushed tone communicating a kind of easy-read mortal gravity. Instead, Campbell conveys a certain nostalgia for that defining sound of his prime-- or at least a nostalgia for a time when that sound was popular. "It's Your Amazing Grace" and "A Thousand Lifetimes" deploy the same tricks he's been using for decades-- those ornate string arrangements and prominent guitar themes that recall fellow Wrecking Crew member Jack Nitzsche-- but they sound fresh on these tracks, even at times adventurous. The short, instrumental interstitials are distracting as Campbell tries to cover every corner of his history, but the the presence of Billy Corgan, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, and all the Dandy Warhols on Ghost suggests that the influence of this style has been, at the very least, broad.
Campbell is still taking stock of his life and career ("Sometimes I get confused, Lord/ My past gets in my way"), and that sounds odd only because it's not something he has not historically been inclined to do: He's more renowned as a sensitive vocalist than as a confessional songwriter. So songs like "A Better Place" and "There's No Me… Without You", both co-penned with producer Julian Raymond, sound perhaps a bit too direct for Campbell, although his voice remains strong enough that he doesn't need your pity to put these songs across, no matter how silly some of their sentiments. Anchoring Ghost is a handful of covers that are perhaps only slightly less adventurous than those on his 2008 album, Meet Glen Campbell. The title track and "Any Trouble" are lesser Westerberg, but they fit the album's theme all too well. Likewise, "Hold on Hope" is an obvious GBV choice (what, you expected "Tractor Rape Chain"?), but Campbell owns its schmaltz as well as its simple optimism, suggesting that Bob Pollard wrote the line "there hides the cowboy" with Campbell in mind. Ghost is nowhere near his best, most consistent, or most durable album, but that's ultimately not even the right way to measure its modest accomplishment. Instead, it's a surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs.
