Letters.

About Letters

Letters is the fourth album by American singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, released in 1972 by Reprise Records. Letters was a more sedate, piano-oriented album than its predecessors, and soaked in the influence of Webb's peer and eventual close friend Joni Mitchell. "I was tremendously influenced by Joni Mitchell," he admitted to Peter Doggett of Record Collector in 1994. "She was a good friend, and I was fortunate enough to be around her when she was working on For the Roses and Court and Spark. We were just part of each other's lives for a while. I definitely envied that part of her work -- the idea that this is just a conversation you're listening in on. It can still be poetry, but not self-conscious or forced poetry. I got extremely under her spell as a writer -- I still am. I used to go to the studio and listen to her record, sit quietly in the back of the control room. After the Beatles, Joni was the next big blip on my radar screen, in terms of, 'Hey, pay attention: this girl is doing something a little bit different.'" Mitchell's longtime engineer Henry Lewy also did some engineering work for Letters as well.