Reading Lyrics anthology of songs WSJ review

As Scott at powerlineblog says "Wall Street Journal's articles are accesssible online to nonsubsribers through tomorrow in honor of WSJ.com's tenth anniversary "One of the best book reviews the Wall Street Journal has ever run is a review by songwriter extraordinaire Jimmy Webb of a compendium of song lyrics selected by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball. In the review, Webb notes the difficulty of placing words to music. In a well-written song, the words seem magically to flow right out of the melody. Webb powerfully testifies to the difficulty involved in creating this magic. Below is an excerpt of the review, which ran in the Journal in February 2001 under the heading "Singing the praises of song": Along comes "Reading Lyrics" (Pantheon, 706 pages, $39.50), an anthology of songs, to give the lie to the emperor's new groove."