It’s been a privilege over the past few years to interview Brian Wilson, Neil Finn and Steven Wilson about the craft of composing tunes — since in my opinion they are three of the best songwriters ever.

On Wednesday, I added to that list by speaking with Jimmy Webb.

Can you spell G-I-A-N-T?

Webb’s latest album, JUST ACROSS THE RIVER, is a twist on the “duets” concept. On each song, Webb sings with alternate verses and harmonies provided by a different friend/artist — and each participant is guesting on a tune that specifically means a great deal to them. Lucinda Williams wanted to sing “Galveston,” for example, while Jackson Browne claims “P.F. Sloan” is one of his favorite songs ever. Even Linda Rondstadt volunteered to come out of retirement for a chance to sing with Webb on “All I Know.”

Also wonderfully involved: Billy Joel (“Wichita Lineman”), Glen Campbell (“By the Time I Get to Phoenix”), Mark Knopfler (“The Highwayman”), Willie Nelson (“If You See Me Getting Smaller”), and Vince Gill (“Oklahoma Nights”).

It’s a pretty amazing record. In addition to the guest vocalists, producer/longtime friend Freddy Mollin lined up a collection of the top session players in Nashville — no mean feat considering their respective touring and studio schedules — and recorded 13 stunning arrangements in two days. “On the way to the studio that first morning,” Webb told me, “Freddy said, ‘These guys aren’t musicians. They’re assassins.’”

At the core, though, it’s about a terrific collection of Webb’s songs — some massively famous and others more obscure — that make a project like JUST ACROSS THE RIVER possible. One doesn’t need a degree in music theory to intuitively listen to Webb’s material and recognize the unique and artistic structures and changes in his tunes. They just somehow zig when everyone else would zag, and the melodies and stories therein are the stuff of genius.

So how does he do it?

Here are excerpts from my conversation with Webb about songwriting. By the way, Webb performs Saturday night at the Katharine Hepburn Theater in Old Saybrook. If you don’t already have plans — and maybe even if you do — give serious consideration to seeing this show.

-- On why being bored in church might help you write something as cool as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”: “My father was a minister and I had piano lessons until I was about 12 and then I started playing piano and organ at church services — just straight renditions of songs out of the Baptist hymnal. Well, the Baptist hymnal is fairly limited, harmonically — simple triads dating back to the turn of the 20th century meant to be performed by the most rudimentary musicians.

“And so I would be up there playing ‘How Firm a Foundation’ or ‘Amazing Grace’ while they passed the collection plate. That process can take a while and so, to amuse myself and prevent catatonia, I would come up with counter lines and minor-chord variations and turn stuff around and just basically transform these arrangements. A lot of good songwriters have come out of church because there have been a lot of bored piano players in church.

“Anyway, I think a lot of my songs structures came out of that background because I opened myself to a lot of possibilities beyond the norm or standard."

-- On the repercussions of playing around with hymns in church: “A lot of little old ladies — no offense to little old ladies anywhere; I’m rapidly becoming a little old man — would come up to my father and say, ‘Reverend Webb, your son is doing strange things to the hymns.’ And he’d say to me, ‘Jimmy, what are you doing?’ ‘Dad, I’m just stick a few minor chords in there.’ And he said, ‘Okay, just don’t get too crazy. They need to recognize the hymns.’”

-- On the magic of the creative process and whether accumulated knowledge and awareness of “the rules” eventually has a diminishing-returns effect on the ability to write uniquely: “It could happen that way. You know, late in his career, Leonard Bernstein was listening to (then-young Broadway composer) Stephen Schwartz at the piano. And Bernstein said, ‘Oh, how I wish I could do that — just sit and play. But I can’t. I’m Leonard Bernstein.’ And I know what he meant. There’s a kind of pathos in that remark that really got my attention. I’m sort of in that same position. You need to take your innocence every day like viamins. I say, ‘Let me be a clean slate and sit at the piano without any plan and connect with that old same source.’ I wrote purely from instinct as a teenager and was writing hits without knowing how or why.

“But at a certain point you become self conscious and beging to follow certain stylistic rules or boundaries and they ossify and become a sort of creative prison. You just have to be careful not to let that happen."

-- On breaking his own rules: One of the most memorable lyrics in Webb’s catalog is from “Wichita Lineman” and is pretty ingrained: “And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all time / And the Wichita lineman / Is still on the line.” Webb points out that it’s a false rhyme: “time” doesn’t rhyme with “line” and says, “I have fairly strict laws against false rhymes and near-rhymes and how songs get constructed. There is a list of things you should never do.”

-- What’s another thing he should never do? “Never write a song called ‘White Christmas’ because it’s already been done. In a big way. Well, I don’t know anymore. I wouldn’t do it, but some kid might come along and might write ‘White Christmas,’ but it’d better be good. It needs to be better than the original because, otherwise … ”