DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MACARTHUR PARK")
RICHARD HARRIS: (Singing) MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet, green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it 'cause it took so long to bake it. And I'll never have that recipe again.
DAVIES: That's "MacArthur Park" with some of the most baffling song lyrics and music. Even so, it became a huge hit for Richard Harris in 1968. It was written by Jimmy Webb, who wrote quite a few hit songs in the '60s and '70s. They include "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston" by Glen Campbell. Webb's other songs include "Didn't We," recorded by Barbra Streisand, "Up, Up And Away" and "The Worst That Could Happen" by The 5th Dimension, and "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" by Linda Ronstadt.
At one point, he had five top 10 songs in less than two years. Webb turned 80 years old in August, and there's a new album of his unreleased songs titled "Yours For The Taking." This weekend, Webb appears at the Grand Ole Opry, and later this month, he'll be featured in a PBS "Great Performances" special. Webb has a lifetime achievement award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He got his start in the business as a staff songwriter for Motown.
We're going to listen to Terry's 2004 interview with Jimmy Webb. She began by asking him about his song, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." The long and varied list of singers who have recorded it besides Glen Campbell include Isaac Hayes, Marty Robbins, Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, Nick Cave, Dean Martin, William Bell, James Brown, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Four Tops, Solomon Burke, Ray Price, Sarah Vaughan, Harry Belafonte and Peggy Lee.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: Let's talk about one of your best-known songs, and that is, "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." I was reading this is the third most performed song in the last 50 years, according to BMI, who should know. Wow. How did you write the song?
JIMMY WEBB: Well, it's more of a song about something I wish I had done than something I really did, in that I did not get in my car and drive back to Oklahoma to punish this young woman for not reciprocating my love and affection. In fact, a guy approached me one night after a concert, and he had a map, and he had all the times and he had a stopwatch, and he showed me how it was impossible for me to drive from LA to Phoenix and then how far it was to Albuquerque. And then, in short, he told me, this song is impossible. And so it is.
It's a kind of fantasy about something I wish I would have done, and it sort of takes place in a twilight zone of reality. May I - I hasten to add that I think that the appeal of the song lies in its sort of succinct tale, its beginning, middle and end. And the fact that it sort of has an O. Henry-esque twist at the end, which consists merely of the guy saying, she didn't think that I - she didn't really think that I would go, but he did. And, in fact, I didn't (laughter). I didn't go. I stayed for more punishment.
GROSS: Does the woman or girl - I don't know how old you were - that you wrote this for know that it was about her?
WEBB: Oh, yes, she does. And she's still - thankfully, she's very much alive and she's actually married into the Ronstadt clan. She's - her name is Susan Ronstadt now. And she and I are very, very close friends. And there were many, many songs that were inspired by her and came about as a result of our, well, very young relationship. High school. She was a high school sweetheart.
GROSS: Well, I think this would be a good time to hear the Glen Campbell version of "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," written by my guest Jimmy Webb.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX")
GLEN CAMPBELL: (Singing) By the time I get to Phoenix, she'll be rising. She'll find the note I left hanging on her door. She'll laugh when she reads the part that says I'm leaving 'cause I've left that girl so many times before. By the time I make Albuquerque, she'll be working. She'll probably stop at lunch and give me a call. She'll just hear that phone keep on ringing off the wall. That's all. By the time I make Oklahoma, she'll be sleeping. She'll turn softly...
GROSS: "By The Time I Got To Phoenix" started a short series of place songs, you know, "Galveston," "Wichita Lineman." Did you start to think that if you put a place name in the song, that it would hit?
WEBB: No, it wasn't so much my doing as it was deliberate manipulation on the part of A&R and the labels, and their - in their attempts to engineer what we called, in those days, a follow-up record. But I remember particularly the day that they called me about Wichita and said, Glen's looking for a follow-up for "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." But it's got to be a place. And I thought, well, OK. I didn't particularly like that idea. I'm not someone who thinks that way or creates that way.
But I'm a young songwriter, and I think I've got the chops to do it. And I sit down, and I spend maybe an hour and 45 minutes or two hours working on a song. I come up with a concept based on some memories I have of some blue-collar guys working on telephone lines around liberal Kansas and the panhandle of Oklahoma out there in that great kind of land of no horizon. And I called them up, and I said, I've got a song over here. I said, but I don't really think it's finished. And they said, well, send it over anyway (laughter). And I sent it over. And they called me back in a state of exaltation over what I had written. And they put it out, and it became this huge hit.
And this song has had - people still tell me, and it bothers me a little bit because when I was writing my book on songwriting, "Tunesmith," I actually, for the first time, analyzed some of my songs, and I was really shocked and appalled at what I found. And one of the things that I found was that in "Wichita Lineman," there's a line that goes like this - and I need you more than want you and I want you for all time, and the Wichita lineman is still on the line. And the first thing I thought of when I read it is false rhyme.
GROSS: Oh.
WEBB: That's a false rhyme. It's the biggest...
GROSS: Line and time.
WEBB: That's the most biggest, awfullest, dumbest, most obvious false rhyme in history. And night after night, at performance after performance, person after person comes up to me until now. I'm talking about a hundred thousand people have walked up to me and said, you know, the greatest line you ever wrote, I need you more than want you and I want you for all time, you know? And so I don't know how to explain that. I wouldn't have - had I known what I was doing, I wouldn't have written that line. I would have found a way to make it rhyme. It was only years later that I became aware of what a songwriter was even supposed to do. I was really just a kid who was kind of writing from the hip and the heart.
GROSS: Why don't we hear Freedy Johnston's version of that? You familiar with the version?
WEBB: I've heard it, and I like it.
GROSS: Good. Me too. Let's hear it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WICHITA LINEMAN (LIVE)")
FREEDY JOHNSTON: (Singing) I am a lineman for the county, and I ride the main road, searching in the sun for another overload. I hear you singing in the wires. I hear you through the whine. And the Wichita lineman is still on the line. I know I need a short vacation, but it don't look like rain. And if it snows that stretch down south will never take the strain. And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.
DAVIES: That's Freedy Johnston. We'll hear more of Terry's interview with Jimmy Webb after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2004 interview with Hall of Fame songwriter Jimmy Webb. His hit songs include "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman" and "MacArthur Park." He has a new album of unreleased songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: Now, you grew up in Oklahoma. Your father was a Baptist minister. How did the church figure into your daily life and into your musical life as a child?
WEBB: It was a totally all-encompassing influence in that when you're the son of a Southern Baptist minister, you are informed at a very early age that you are part and parcel of his ministry and that your behavior reflects on his image in the community. And therefore, your every movement, your every word, everything that you do is monitored. And that includes the music that you play, the music that you listen to. And my mother's dream from the very beginning, when she started me on piano at 6 years of age, was that I would be church pianist. And I was.
By the time I was 12 years old, I was playing. I was the church pianist. And I had also moved over to organ and was a large part of the musical program in the church. And we did specials. We sang three-part. My father played guitar. My mother played accordion. I can just remember the top of my mother's head sticking over this big Hohner accordion. She was short, and the accordion was taller than she was.
GROSS: Boy, that sounds very hip, guitar, accordion and piano.
WEBB: Oh, it was pretty cool. And we learned some very, very useful things. I mean, to improvise three-part harmony on the fly, I mean, that's a pretty cool thing to learn when you're a kid. And it also got us up in front of people and got us - and I say us because I had siblings. I had a brother and three sisters. And we all sang.
GROSS: Now, your family moved to southern California, to San Bernardino in 1964. Did your father get a church there?
WEBB: Yes, he was pastoring in Colton. And I finished my high school in Colton. I graduated as a senior from Colton High School. It was the year that JFK was assassinated. And it was also the year that my mother died. And so it was really quite an eye-opener for me.
And my - it's interesting to note that my mother, after expending these huge reserves of energy, sort of lashing me into a somewhat formidable young musician, that she died before I ever did anything. She never heard me - she never heard one of my songs on the radio. She never saw me get one award. She never saw one piece of sheet music on the piano with my name on it. I have regrets about that because had she lived just a little bit longer, I think she would've been really proud of me, you know?
GROSS: Sure, sure.
WEBB: So all of a sudden, I was exposed to the Beach Boys, which was like, you know, it was like a fish to water. I mean, I loved southern California. I loved the lifestyle. I loved the Beach Boys. I loved the Righteous Brothers. And I just wanted to get into it. I wanted to get into the record business, stop, you know...
GROSS: Did your father love you doing that?
WEBB: No, he didn't, and because one of the precepts of the Baptist Church, Terry, is that we do not believe in dancing. The Southern Baptist Church does not believe in dancing. In fact, Glen Campbell told me a story once. He said, Jimmy, he says, you know why Baptists don't make love standing up, don't you? And I said, no, how come? He says because he's afraid - they're afraid people will think they're dancing.
(LAUGHTER)
WEBB: That's kind of a typical Glen Campbell story. I think it's a pretty good one. But, you know, I had to sort of sneak out of the house to play dances, which I did because, hey, you could pick up 15 or 20 bucks. And I had three or four guys I played with. When the Beatles came along, I was playing Dave Brubeck.
Dave Brubeck had a brother named Howard. And Howard laboriously transcribed every note that Dave Brubeck ever played, including all of Paul Desmond's solos and everything else. It was all in ink, pen and ink. And we, with equal fervor, digested all of these transcriptions and learned to play Dave Brubeck. And we could cough it up. We could play "Blue Rondo A La Turk" just like Howard had written it down.
GROSS: The year your mother died, your father moved back to Oklahoma. Did he want - you didn't. You stayed in California. Did your father want you to go with him?
WEBB: He sure did (laughter). I remember we were standing in San Bernardino, California, in the parking lot of the Palm Paradise - Paradise Palm Motel. And my dad had the car packed. And he had my sisters, my brothers was in the car. And I was standing there, and I said, Dad, I'm not going. (Laughter) I said, there's no way in the world that I'm going back to Oklahoma after coming all this way and being this close to Hollywood. I just have to try it. I have to try. He said, son, he said, this songwriting thing, he says, it's just going to break your heart. And, P.S., he was right about that more than once.
But he said, but - and he dug down in his pocket, and he came up with $40. And he said, son, he says, this is all I've got. But he says, it's yours. And he gave me 40 bucks. And he got in his caravan, his little trailer truck thing, and off he went. And that was a lonely, very isolated moment in time, standing there in a parking lot with these neon lights blinking, these kind of electronic palm trees blinking on and off over my head going, now what have I done? How am I going to handle this?
GROSS: How long was it between that moment and getting your contract working for Motown publishing?
WEBB: (Laughter) Well, it was not much longer than a year. I borrowed $1,000 from some friends of mine in Newport Beach. I bought a VW. It cost me 600 bucks. And I started - I was going to junior college. And I was a music major and not doing very well because my mind was on something else. And just eking by on whatever money I could make on gigs. And about a year later, I had, you know, after exhausting every other opportunity, I walked into the offices at Jobete. And Vicki (ph), this big woman who sat behind the reception desk, says, honey, you must be lost (laughter). And she had a good laugh.
And I sat down and talked to her for a while. And she ended up taking one of my tapes into the inner sanctum of the office at Jobete and playing it. I could hear it playing through the door. And after the song, the door opened and a young man, Black man named Frank Wilson, stuck his head out the door and cocked his head at me and said, very, very softly, said, would you come in here, please? And that was literally the moment. It was like the allegorical moment, if you will, when the door opened for me.
DAVIES: Jimmy Webb speaking to Terry Gross in 2004. He has a new album of unreleased songs titled "Yours For The Taking." We'll hear more after a short break. Later, Justin Chang reviews the new South Korean film "Possible Love." Here's a track from Webb's new album. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IF I EVER GET TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN")
WEBB: (Singing) If I ever get to talk to you again, I'd rather get to know you than to try to be your friend. I must have sounded like my life was at an end. But even that will mend if I ever get to talk to you again. If I ever get to say what's on my mind, I'd rather say it and really mean it than to mean to be so kind. I must have sounded like I'd fallen far behind. But there's a truth I need to find if I ever get to say what's on my mind. Didn't want to be so full of tears.
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. We're listening to Terry's 2004 interview with Hall of Fame songwriter Jimmy Webb, whose 1960s-era hits include "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "MacArthur Park" and "Didn't We." He turned 80 in August and has a new album of his unreleased songs, titled "Yours For The Taking."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: You started writing hit songs at an interesting time in the history of radio. You know, we're talking the latter part of the 1960s. So it's a time when you still have pop music on AM, and you have the beginnings of, you know, quote, "progressive" rock on the FM. And...
WEBB: Underground, we used to call it.
GROSS: Underground. Yeah. So your songs were falling a bit on both, weren't they?
WEBB: I was very fortunate that way. If it hadn't been for FM, quote, "underground," unquote, radio, "MacArthur Park" would have never been broken as a single because Top 40 was not going to play "MacArthur Park." It was seven minutes and 20 seconds long. Parentheses, and "Hey Jude" is seven minutes, 21 seconds long.
GROSS: (Laughter).
WEBB: I'm sure that's just a coincidence. But "MacArthur Park" would never have broken on Top 40. In fact, I remember Ron Jacobs calling me from KHJ in Los Angeles and saying, we'll go on "MacArthur Park", but you have to edit it for us. And I just said, no, I'm not going to do that. And they said, well, you realize what you're doing. I mean, you're throwing away a hit record. And I said, well, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to edit it because that's what it is. And a week later, they were on it.
And as soon as stations like KHJ started playing "MacArthur Park" in its entirety, forget it. It rolled across the country. It was inescapable. And I felt terrible for people like Herbert Solow at Newsweek magazine, who lamented in, like, a whole page of Newsweek that he had spent his entire summer trying to escape "MacArthur Park."
GROSS: (Laughter).
WEBB: And that he had finally sailed - he'd gone to Martha's Vineyard and gotten on a sailboat and sailed way out to a tiny little island and gotten on a beach. And this woman came walking by with a transistor radio, and the mournful, saccharine strings of "MacArthur Park," you know, leaked from her transistor radio into - and so that he had actually found it was truly inescapable. And...
GROSS: And it's your fault.
WEBB: (Laughter).
GROSS: Well, "MacArthur Park" and "Stairway To Heaven" are two of the most, like, baffling lyrics...
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: ...In the history of pop songs. So let's go over the lyric a little bit.
WEBB: Let's don't.
GROSS: Oh, no, no, no, no. We have to. We have to. Well...
WEBB: Anyway, go ahead. I know. We have to do this. So...
GROSS: We have to do this. So, you know, with my apologies, here - you know, here we go.
WEBB: Yeah.
GROSS: MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet green icing melting down. Someone left the cake...
WEBB: Flowing down. Flowing down.
GROSS: Flowing down. Excuse me. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can make it, but it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have the recipe again.
WEBB: I don't think that I can take it 'cause it took so long to bake it.
GROSS: Sorry.
WEBB: So, I mean...
GROSS: You know, you rewrite it in your mind, and that's the way you sing it to yourself.
WEBB: Anyway, you can freely substitute. I don't really think it matters that much.
GROSS: What were you thinking about when you wrote this? What is it?
WEBB: Well, I was thinking about the end of a love affair, you know, in a very lurid, sort of melodramatic terms because I - this whole love affair had taken place in and about the environs of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, which, in those days, was this kind of lovely little park with ducks and things. Now it's like - I don't know what it is. I think it's even smaller. I think they've chopped it down into a smaller piece of real estate. But there were boats there, and it passed for a romantic place when one was a teenager. And so, really, I make no defense of the lyrics of "MacArthur Park." They were written in a hallucinogenic era when, actually, such lyrics are quite common, and most of them don't need to be defended. It was an era of that kind of thing. And...
GROSS: See, you're using the psychedelic defense (laughter).
WEBB: Well, it's not even a defense. I think it's - again, I stand by "MacArthur Park." I think that it's completely unique and is a very viable attempt to coalesce rock and classical music and sort of format something for the radio that has movements that has a kind of grandiose, symphonic feeling to it. I'm really not - I did the arrangement myself. I won a Grammy for it. So, I mean, I don't think there's anything to defend, really. It was just part of a lot of kind of careless lyric writing.
DAVIES: Songwriter Jimmy Webb speaking with Terry Gross. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2004 interview with songwriter Jimmy Webb. He has a new album of unreleased songs. His best-known songs include "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman" and "MacArthur Park," which he and Terry were talking about before the break.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: It's interesting. You know, it does have this kind of, like, trippy lyric about the cake melting in the rain and everything. And, you know, Richard Harris had the hit, and he - you know, I don't think he struck anybody as being particularly of, you know, like, the groovy psychedelic era. So it was kind of odd matching in a way.
WEBB: Well, he thought he was (laughter).
GROSS: Well, judging from - I'm looking at the album jacket of the CD reissue...
WEBB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...And I don't know if this is the same thing that was on the album. There's a picture of him in a park. I don't know if it's the park.
WEBB: Yeah.
GROSS: Wearing, like, a black robe.
WEBB: Looking very sullen.
GROSS: Yes. Seen on this kind of throne...
WEBB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...With a red headband tied around his forehead.
WEBB: Yeah. He saw himself that way, too. He always saw himself on a throne. In fact, he ended his career playing kings. He played Caesar and then, in "Harry Potter," he sort of - he was playing sort of the king of the magicians. But he was a king. And I just want to tell you that...
GROSS: Yeah.
WEBB: ...Before we say too much about him, that I just attended a memorial service for him in London, and Patty Maloney and Liam Neeson and all the Celtic crowd came out to say goodbye to Richard, who was one of the great, colorful figures of our age. And I - to me, even though - I think I could say without fear of contradiction that this much-maligned song, "MacArthur Park," has been recorded probably 2 or 300 times by everybody from the Four Tops to Frank Sinatra to - but my favorite version of it is still Richard Harris'.
GROSS: Did he want to ask you anything about the song before he actually recorded it?
WEBB: No. You know what he said? He said, I'll have that.
GROSS: (Laughter) He's talking about striped pants in the lyrics, and he says, stripe-ed (ph). Did you want him to say stripe-ed?
WEBB: Actually, I can give you something much better than that. He - the name of the song is "MacArthur Park." All the way through, he sung MacArthur's Park. (Impersonating Richard Harris) MacArthur's Park is melting. He sung MacArthur's Park, and he couldn't be dissuaded from that. And, you know - and I've had artists change my lyrics throughout my whole career in that way, and sometimes they get something in their head, and you can't get it out.
GROSS: Well, let's hear Richard Harris' version of your song "MacArthur Park."
WEBB: Oh, let's do.
GROSS: (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MACARTHUR PARK")
HARRIS: (Singing) Spring was never waiting for us, girl. It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance. Between the parted pages and were pressed in love's hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants. MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet, green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again. Oh, no. I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave...
GROSS: That's Richard Harris' hit recording of "MacArthur Park," a song written by my guest Jimmy Webb. What did you think when Donna Summer had her hit disco version of "MacArthur Park"?
WEBB: Well, first of all, I'm not - I was not a great disco fan, but I am a great Donna Summer fan, and I think she's got these great pipes. And she really sang this song. It was also just from a purely financial point of view, it was - and this is probably one of those asterisk quotes at the bottom of my career somewhere. It was the only No. 1 record I've ever had in the United States.
GROSS: Really?
WEBB: And I remember - yes, because everything else, you know, through my heyday, I was battling the Beatles. And the Beatles quite often held down the top three spots, sometimes the top five. "MacArthur Park" was kept out of No. 1 by a Beatles record. I don't remember which one it was, but they just sat there. They just sat there for 16 weeks and kept us out of No. 1. So "MacArthur Park" was never higher than two, with a bullet, with Richard Harris.
And a lot of those records were stuck either in the top 10 or in the high - the low teens or the high teens because the Beatles held down so many slots. And here it was finally, my first No. 1 record. And I remember the day it went No. 1, and I remember what I did. I hired a limousine and I drove around Hollywood all day long, saying to myself, I have the No. 1 record. I'm No. 1. I'm No. 1. I'd roll down the window, and the guy next to me, I'd say, I'm No. 1.
(LAUGHTER)
WEBB: And they're going, who is that guy? Is he nuts? I'm No. 1. Hey.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MACARTHUR PARK (LIVE)")
DONNA SUMMER: (Singing) MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet, green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again. Oh, no. I recall the yellow cotton dress...
GROSS: Do you see yourself as straddling different eras, you know, of having, like, one foot in the rock era and one foot in the popular song era?
WEBB: Oh, I think it's inescapable. I think it's absolutely true. And, in many ways, I've been fortunate because of that because I've had a breadth of experience and the artists that I was conversant with. The fact that Johnny Mercer would call me up and ask me if I was interested in writing a song with him is quite incredible when you place it alongside, for instance, the fact that Lowell George, who founded Little Feat, recorded one of my songs on his solo album. And that I played piano on "Jump Into The Fire" on "Nilsson Schmilsson" and that I - my first song was recorded by The Supremes. It was a Christmas song called "My Christmas Tree."
And so I've been almost extraordinarily fortunate to have been able to live in those two worlds and to intimately embrace those two worlds, to have been at the recording session in London when the Beatles recorded "Honey Pie." To have been sitting there watching them play. So it is - it's really - if variety is the spice of life, then, you know, my life has been well seasoned.
GROSS: Jimmy Webb, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
WEBB: It's been a longtime dream of mine to talk to you, Terry.
DAVIES: Jimmy Webb spoke to Terry Gross in 2004. He turned 80 in August. He has a new album of unreleased songs titled "Yours For The Taking." This weekend, he appears at the Grand Ole Opry, and on October 30, he has a PBS "Great Performances" special. Here's a track from the album "Glen Campbell And Jimmy Webb: In Session." It begins with Webb talking about his song, "Galveston."
WEBB: When Glenn first recorded "Galveston," he kind of did it in a medium march. It was like - it was a little faster than I had intended for it to be. But then I wasn't complaining, either, because it was top 10. As the years have gone by, the tempo seems to have settled back, you know, to where it was originally meant to be. And it's almost as though songs want - songs know where they want to be sung. They know how fast they want to be sung. And if you try to sing them any faster, they creak and they protest and they complain until finally, you get them back to where they should have been maybe in the beginning.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GALVESTON")
CAMPBELL: (Singing) Galveston, oh Galveston. I still hear your sea winds blowing, and I still see her dark eyes glowing. She was 21 when I left Galveston. Galveston, oh Galveston. I still hear your sea waves crashing while I watch the cannons flashing. I clean my gun and dream of Galveston. I still see her standing by the water, standing there looking out to sea. And is she waiting there for me on the beach where we used to run?
DAVIES: Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film "Possible Love," South Korea's official Oscar submission for best international feature. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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