Few artists get the luxury of crafting their final album as a conscious farewell, but
Glen Campbell isn't just any artist.
Campbell is a titan with a legacy that begins before he started to record solo albums, so if anyone deserves to craft a career-capping final record it is he, even if this opportunity is bittersweet, tainted by the knowledge that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's sometime during its recording. His disease does hang over
Ghost on the Canvas, its sadness surfacing on the instrumental interstitials written by
Roger Manning, but this album bears none of the ghoulish fetishization of death that haunts
Rick Rubin's latter-day productions of
Johnny Cash. No, producer
Julian Raymond has crafted
Ghost on the Canvas as a specific sequel to the very good 2008
Meet Glen Campbell, which consciously re-created
Campbell's golden decade of 1967-1977 through newly written songs and covers of modern rockers.
Raymond uses the same formula here, finding tunes by
Manning,
Paul Westerberg (the title track),
Jakob Dylan ("Nothing But the Whole Wide World"),
Robert Pollard ("Hold on Hope"), and
Teddy Thompson ("In My Arms"), then crafting sturdy originals with
Campbell, all evoking such luxuriant dramatic classics as "Wichita Lineman" without succumbing under self-conscious weight. It's a delicate trick that, apart from those too elegiac instrumentals, never once seems forced, a testament to
Raymond's skills as a producer and
Campbell's as a musician and singer. Perhaps
Ghost on the Canvas doesn't revisit every high in
Campbell's history, but it pays honor to his legacy and feels like an appropriate and subtly moving farewell. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
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