Glen Campbell Says ‘Adios’: The Story Behind His Farewell Album

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Glen Campbell’s new album — his true farewell record, despite an earlier recording that was billed as such — is Adios, a collection of songs he secretly recorded shortly after his final tour came to a close at the end of 2012. It opens with his version of a song it’s hard to believe he never recorded before: “Everybody’s Talkin’,” the Fred Neil tune made into a smash hit by Nilsson in the early 1970s. Surely, you think, it was chosen because, without having been written to, it seems to describe the condition of Alzheimer’s.

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In fact, Adios seems to be a concept album of sorts, with most of the tracks making at least a passing reference to remembering, forgetting, being stuck inside one’s head, or just saying so long — all the way down to, obviously, the Jimmy Webb-penned title track. A line like “Maybe someday I believe we’ll forget”? Titles like “Am I All Alone (Or Is It Only Me)” or “Funny How Time Slips Away”? You’ve got to commend Campbell’s associates for how cleverly they managed to find existing songs whose metaphors would seem to allude to his very literal condition.

Except friends and family members all insist this “concept” was coincidental. His family just wanted a farewell record that skewed toward the singer’s classic style of gentle, lyrical country, leaning on tunes already familiar enough to the Alzheimer’s-stricken singer that they wouldn’t involve an impossible learning curve. If those tunes mostly happen to bring up issues of memory, that was a bittersweet kismet.

“I promise you, it wasn’t pre-planned,” says producer Carl Jackson, in the midst of agreeing that the songs on the album seem to be thematically grouped. “Even with the title of the album being Adios, we didn’t think about that at the time. That was just one of Glen’s favorite Jimmy Webb songs. It wasn’t like ‘We need to do ‘Adios’ because this is gonna be your last record, or ‘Oh, man, we need to do “Everybody’s Talkin’” because that has this underlying message. We were just cutting songs.”