While James Taylor and Glen Campbell (who both recorded Webb’s song, "Wichita Lineman," 40 years apart) spend their time in the spotlight, Webb’s name is only familiar to music geeks who bother to read the tiny liner notes on CD sleeves.

Webb comes to Outpost in the Burbs at The Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair, on Friday, Dec. 5. at 8 p.m.

Those components are a good chord structure, which is the underlying foundation under any song. And it’s one of the most underappreciated and least perceived parts of the song. But it’s that chord structure that establishes the rhythm and the feel.

And then secondly, it’s the melody. You only have to make one of three decisions with the melody. You either go up, you stay where you are, or you go down. But it’s the way you go up and down or stay where you are that decides whether that is a memorable thing that feels good on the ear and wants to be repeated, and we’ll say even not just repeated in the sense that [you say] "Oh, gee, I’d like to hear that song again," but years later a performer comes by and says, "You know I’m going to do this song again because this is a memorable melody."

And the third thing is the lyrics. The lyrics do have to make some sort of sense, even though you wouldn’t know that 90 percent of the time because words are kind of thrown together and there’s a surprising number of very successful artists who love to tell these Lincoln and Gettysburg stories about how they wrote the lyrics out on the back of an envelope, or somewhere in the studio.

It’s an admission. It’s an admission that they don’t think the lyrics are really very important. But in my own work, I have a kind of narrative style. One of my most important techniques is that if you write a great first line, which is the most important line in the song, if you write a great first line, you’re halfway there.

You have all this going on together now. You’ve got these chords that are helping you subtly, almost invisible, you have this melody that you hope is irresistible because you make the right decisions up, down, and then thirdly, you have some sort of a narrative going on that engages the other temporal lobe, which likes to follow the story — ideally, that should become an irresistible one, two, three punch.

JIMMY: The epiphany experienced as you are listening to a certain song, I believe is what happens when all three of these elements, chords, melody and lyrics, are working together … you [as a songwriter] communicate with everybody at the same time. And in a sense that’s what a hit record is.

And it’s like an emotional wave is breaking in my chest, and as I get into the last verse of that song and I start finishing it up, there’s something that’s bigger than me kind of rushing through my head like a windstorm saying, "This is it, man! This is it! This is what you do. This is what you were put here for!"

It’s a kind of a thrill, and it’s almost a sob that goes through your body. You go, "I don’t know whether this is a hit or not, but it certainly could be." And I think that’s as close as you’re ever going to get to knowing.