Glen Campbell bid a public farewell in 2012, playing his last concert roughly a year after he announced he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Improbably, the illness provided a coda to Campbell’s career; he quickly released four albums, culminating with this year’s Adiós. Considering his debilitating illness, this productivity is remarkable. But it has also been noteworthy as Campbell’s longest stretch of secular records since 1993’s Somebody Like That. He spent the next 15 years in a wilderness of Christian music and re-recordings before reemerging in 2008 with Meet Glen Campbell, an album designed to evoke memories of his plush 1960s hits while relying on songs from modern rockers. The skillful balance of relatively contemporary tunes—Paul Westerberg’s “Sadly, Beautiful” may have been old enough to drive by the time Campbell cut it—and classic production created the template for Campbell’s final years.
Like 2011’s Ghost on the Canvas, Adiós sounds as rich and detailed as any of his ’60s work, but that’s not the only similarity they share. Ghost on the Canvas was also billed as Campbell’s final album, but its supporting farewell tour did well enough to produce a documentary—I’ll Be Me, released in 2014 accompanied by a soundtrack album—and to convince Campbell and his team that the singer could record one more album, Adiós. It’s difficult to discern the precise sense of agency Campbell has had with any of the music he’s recorded while suffering from Alzheimer’s. All of these records allude to the idea of mortality. The very titles of Ghost on the Canvas and 2013’s See You There suggest Campbell has already left this world; I’ll Be Me’s new song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You” is a direct reference to his loss of memory.
Adiós doesn’t hard sell Campbell’s impending death as aggressively as its predecessors, but his imminent departure hangs over the proceedings, articulated clearly in its album title and surfacing on the margins via covers of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Mortality may be pushed toward the surface on Adiós, but this is an album intended to convey happiness, not darkness. Look at the artwork, which depicts a cheery, chipper Campbell. It’s a far cry from the spectre looming on the cover of Ghost on the Canvas, the fatalistic block type of See You There, or the haunted younger photo gracing I’ll Be Me. Adiós seemingly intends to offer a hopeful spin to a tragic story.
It succeeds, to an extent. Certainly, it offers comfort in a way none of its companion records do. Producer Carl Jackson picks up the throwback sensibility of Julian Raymond and Howard Willing—the pair who produced Meet Glen Campbell and Ghost on the Canvas—so Adiós feels like a cousin to Campbell’s lush ’60s and ’70s hits. Such warmth underpins the working thesis that this is the record the singer always wanted to make—the songs he never got around to cutting in his prime—and it also disguises how Campbell’s range has diminished, a welcome move after the stark See You There placed his flaws in the forefront. Here, his voice is just supple enough to lend some sweetness to melodies that demand a gentle touch, many of them written by Jimmy Webb, a songwriter who always brought out the best in Campbell.
Four of Webb’s compositions, all taken from his 1993 album Suspending Disbelief, comprise a third of Adiós. Those songs, along with the Miller tune, are the highlights of the album because they are perched on the precipice of the past and the present. They’re not overly familiar in the vein of the album’s take on “Everybody’s Talkin’”—presented in an arrangement that mimics Harry Nilsson’s hit—or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” They feel like they could be part of a new Campbell album that lacked any biographical baggage. Of course, such a record couldn’t exist. Campbell’s tragic story is woven into the marketing of Adiós, and the album was indeed created as a last testament from a legend; it is impossible to hear without the context of the rest of his career. Adiós doesn't add much to Campbell’s legacy—the comeback records of recent years formed a fitting final act—but it’s a pleasant postscript, a wistful reminder of the joys a great musician once gave.
