JIMMY’S TANGLED WEBB

Songwriter Jimmy Webb of “Up, Up and Away” and “MacArthur Park” fame hasn’t had a Top-10 mainstream song in years. But he maintains he’s no “dinosaur.”

Fewer singers are willing to record someone else’s composition these days, said Webb, so “I realized that opportunity is somewhere else, where I don’t have to depend on the whims of an A&R; person at some record label to determine if I’ll be successful.”

Among his new endeavors:

He’s just completed “The Animals’ Christmas” for CBS Records with 12 Webb songs about the Nativity from the point of view of the animals, featuring Christian music singer Amy Grant as Mary, Art Garfunkel as both the storyteller and Joseph and the London Symphony under Carl Davis; he plans to pursue a longtime dream of writing for Broadway (including a musical based on the 13th-Century Children’s Crusade with director-choreographer Michael Bennett); he’s writing the score for a proposed musical film, “Girl Crazy” for Warner Bros., collaborating with lyricist Jules Shear (who wrote Cyndi Lauper’s “All Through the Night”).

Webb’s venture into country music paid off with a Grammy last Tuesday for his single “The Highwayman.” And on Monday, he will be inducted into the National Songwriters Hall of Fame along with Buddy Holly, Marvin Hamlisch, Boudleaux Bryant and Chuck Berry.

There might even be another pop hit in Webb’s future: “The charm of the whole pop music field is its unpredictability.”