A review by charleseliot
Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting by Jimmy Webb

4.0

Jimmy Webb is one of the greatest songwriters of the last 40 years, and he's a pretty good book author too. Tunesmith is really three books in one. It's a book about the technical craft of songwriting: rhyming, song structure, melody, chords, polishing. It's also a book about the business of being a songwriter: getting published; getting played; getting paid. And finally, it's an autobiography. Predictably, the strongest sections are on the craft of songwriting. The sections on the music business are dated (the book was published in 1999) but still interesting in a "my, how quickly the world changes" way. The autobiographical sections are mercifully brief.

(I am saddened by the steady decay in the quality of book editing and proofing. On p274, Webb gives us "flaunt" where he clearly should have written "flout". Sigh.)