Jimmy Webb is a legend in certain circles. He is a songwriter. Though he is also a musician, his renown comes from what he’s penned over the years. His best known works include Wichita Lineman, Up Up and Away and MacArthur Park, two versions of which were most recently included in Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”

Webb grew up in Oklahoma the son of a Southern Baptist minister. His mother dreamt he would play piano in the church.

“When I was 12 years old, I started playing piano for worship service,” said Webb. “I was really just not interested in the whole thing at all until meeting one particular teacher.”

At first, Webb wasn’t into that either, but she recognized his ability.

“She caught me faking some lessons,” he said. “Because she knew I could hear really well, and I could remember it, she shoved all the music onto the floor, and we started arranging for piano.

“So all of a sudden, instead of just basic reading and writing music, you have a role in the creativity. Usually you’re just plodding through the basic chords of amazing Grace, or whatever it is, but she taught me how to turn that into musical fabrics, beautiful effects.“

By the time Webb reached high school, he was playing guitar in a band with a friend, but in true rock and roll fashion, he kept it from his parents.

“My dad didn’t like rock and roll – at all,” said Webb. “In fact, my father knew for a fact that the devil invented rock and roll and Elvis was his messenger.

“It’s every generation’s objective to make music that their parents will hate, and I think we fulfilled our obligation in that regard.”

Webb said that the popular songwriting is cyclical, dependent on the shifting cultural conversation across generations.

The latest cycle in songwriting has challenges unique to our modern world, namely the advent and proliferation of AI tools. Large language models and other applications of software to aid in creation of many different types of products have been at the forefront of artists’ and crafters’ minds.

Many creators have turned to AI as a tool to expand their production abilities. Those same tools have lowered the threshold for the vast majority of people to produce some form of craft, to the point where images, videos and songs are fully generated by a program.

Music licensing organization ASCAP, where Webb sits on the board, is responsible for protecting songwriters’ and publishers’ interests by enforcing royalty licensing agreements. ASCAP recently issued a statement that they will prioritize human-created works.

“Technology can change the face of the earth,” said Webb. “And we need the cultural influences we’ve always had in this country. That’s where jazz and rock and roll came from. It’ll be a cultural battle that will go right to the bone of symphony concerts, movies, actors and musicians.”

Independent of time or genre, Webb said all songwriters are something of a family. They share the drive to create the experience of creating the soundtrack of people’s lives.

“For all those moments in your life that were decorated by Quincy Jones or Michael Jackson or the Beatles or Hank Williams from generation to generation. The keynote, the concordium that goes along with our memories is music-coded so that a song isn’t just a song. It recreates the nostalgia of a certain period.”

“It’s music that creates the most poignant, poisonous form of nostalgia. It takes you back to the most embarrassing moments of your life – when you ask a girl to go to the prom with you, and she said, ‘No,’ and you didn’t know what to do.

“It takes you to some exquisite times in your life. (As a writer,) you really don’t know what your songs do, but my general observation of using songs and music, as a whole, is that it’s what we use to heal our wounds, and it’s where we communicate on the deepest level. So, I don’t think it’s something we want to give up.

“I don’t know how you take the human being, songwriters, out of songwriting. It’s a mystery to me. I’ll have to leave that to the next generation, I guess.”

Because, to Webb, songwriting is a deeply personal process, where a writer brings their emotions and experiences into the world for everyone to see.

“It’s almost embarrassing, really, to sing the song that you know is really good and you know you mean every word of it and it’s revealing so much about you. Under certain kinds of pressure in a certain situation, it’s revealing things about you that you would never tell anybody ever, in a million years, but in the guise of a song, it can be said.”

He believes that people will find it difficult to recreate that with AI. That the connection people feel with songs, that sparks that nostalgia, comes from more than the computing power and 120 million words. To Webb, the crucible of creation comes from a potent blend of the known and unknown.

“I think a mixture of ignorance, and knowledge is a very volatile, oxygen rich, combustible, creative atmosphere where you make breakthroughs because you don’t know that it’s impossible to do ‘that,’” he said. “That state of mind is a good place to be in, in music, because the things you learn for yourself. Those you never forget. Those are etched in stone.”

See him in concert at BPAC in Pinehurst on Nov. 22, and learn more at jimmywebb.com.