I thought he’d never get through it.” He laughs and stares off into space for a minute. “You know, John sang that song so slowly when he first brought it to me. I ask if he remembers when he first heard it. She ain’t even that old!”Ĭampbell absentmindedly starts to hum John Hartford’s “Gentle On My Mind,” the tune that kickstarted his career some forty-odd years ago. Mostly, there’s my kids and my lovely wife. “When I look back on things-the hit records, the good fortune I’ve had-I can’t complain. He’s been so good to me, man.” As if to underline this, Campbell tenderly fingers a small blue cross tattooed on his left arm. “When you got the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s,” I ask, “were you scared?”Ĭampbell smiles serenely. Many of the songs on Ghost are about getting old and letting go, with frightening emotions lurking just beneath their elegant surfaces. I just put the capo up to the proper key and go! We had a saying in the ’60s: ‘Make the feel, feel good.’ It was no different this time.” “My producer, Julian Raymond, and I went through about 50 submissions and picked a bunch. Has Campbell’s increasing memory loss impeded him from playing and singing these new songs? “Not really,” he says, the faintest trace of his Arkansas accent still sharpening his vowels. Bringing to mind what Campbell’s friend John Wayne said in Rio Bravo: “I’d hate to have to live on the difference.” His new songs-some of which he co-wrote, others penned by the likes of Westerberg, Jakob Dylan, and Teddy Thompson-are virtually their equal. He’s still the untutored guitar genius of L.A.’s famous Wrecking Crew, still the man who skyrocketed to stardom singing “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman” in the late ’60s. And even though some familiar names elude him, and at one point he gets me an Evian, then proceeds to drink it himself, Campbell hasn’t lost a step musically. He sings on about the end, about eternity, and you have to turn your head away, to brush back tears.Ĭampbell, still spry and blond at 75, his wife, Kim, sitting beside him, is in Manhattan to promote Ghost, maybe the finest album he’s ever made. “I know a place between/Life and death/For you and me,” he croons in his familiar, boyish tenor. The country great, who’s going through the early stages of Alzheimer’s, sometimes forgets which family member once saved him from drowning, the last city he played, which guitar he used on “Good Vibrations.” But when he sails into the magical realism of this heartbreaking Paul Westerberg ballad, he’s the old Glen. You don’t know the meaning of “poignant” until Glen Campbell, sitting two feet from you, starts to sing “Ghost on the Canvas,” the title track of his new-and final-album.