Randy Newman

Randy Newman is an eccentric and ironic songwriter who has created a gallery of characters drawn from everyday life but transformed into social philosophers. In a sense, he has created his own "chorus" of voices to debate with them about the state of America.

His sarcasm is a psychotic excess of traditional Jewish humor, which, in contact with the Californian megalopolis, shines with fierce cynicism. Newman's most innovative contribution is his adoption of the short story form, openly rejecting the emphatic prolixity of Whitman (which had greatly influenced American folk singers). His music draws inspiration from the urban repertoire (Tin Pan Alley, swing orchestras, rhythm and blues, New Orleans piano, the Salvation Army, film scores, tropical bands) and in this too he subverts the norms of folk song. Eclectic orchestration and laconic phrasing are his trademarks. A humorist in the style of Lenny Bruce and an ethnologist like Cooder, Newman continues the tradition of the great irregulars of American folklore.

Randy Newman, born in New Orleans but raised in the Hollywood environment (in a dynasty of soundtrack musicians including Alfred, Lionel, and Emil), was a precocious talent, already writing commissioned songs at sixteen (some of which were made famous by others) and composing an entire film score by the age of twenty-two. His first solo album, Randy Newman (Reprise, 1968), contained orchestral songs that already showcased his eclecticism (I Think It's Going To Rain Today, Love Story) and parodies of the American tradition (Davy The Fat Boy).

Newman made his mark with Twelve Songs (Reprise, 1970), twelve sadistic-satirical songs in which he drew on every stereotype of populist music, a serialized portrait of Los Angeles worthy of being placed alongside realistic urban short fiction. Accompanied by session men like Ry Cooder, Clarence White, and Gene Parsons, and on piano by himself, Newman estranges his ballads by immersing them in a 1920s musical atmosphere. The most comic and lively vignettes, steeped in ballroom rhythm & blues, like Have You Seen My Baby and especially Mama Told Me Not To Come, or ragtime, like Lover's Prayer, when not venturing into nightclub swing, like Yellow Man, or country & western, like Old Kentucky Home, alternate cynically with desolate blues, so subdued as to be barely perceptible (Let's Burn Down The Cornfield, Suzanne, haunted by a street organ, and Lucinda). These are improbable stories of orgies, rapes, and betrayals.

Newman received widespread critical acclaim returning to orchestral style with Sail Away (1972). The arrangements by Newman (piano) and Cooder (bottleneck) are a meticulous and erudite masterpiece. The overture is an ironic social commentary on the imaginary voyage of a slave ship to America, depicted by the captain as a terrestrial paradise. Counterbalancing it is the fierce Political Science, in which the warmongering American complains that the peoples he has exterminated hate him. The overall tone of the album is subdued, weak, resigned. Sleepy and melancholic ragtime from cocktail lounges (Lonely At The Top), nostalgic and crooked street tunes (Burn On), the vaudeville of Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear, the jump blues of You Can Leave Your Hat On (destined for belated success in 1987), give the operetta an expressionist cabaret flavor. The finale, monstrous, is a monologue of God mocking humanity that worships him (God's Song). As raucous and irreverent as the previous album was, Sail Away is formal and serious, with parables that brush metaphysical abysses. The confidence with which Newman commands the orchestra is that of a Mahlerian symphonist.

Newman increased his reputation as master of the realist vignette (and of irreveret wit) with the southern sketches of Good Old Boys (1974). Rednecks is anthemic as much as it is parodistic in painting a portrait of the rough southerner. Birmingham borrows from ragtime music of the early 1900s and wraps it in Morricone-style strings to embellish a stately singalong melody. Marie is a sleepy lullaby worthy of easy-listening orchestras. The feeling of a sequence of musichall skits continues with the rhythm'n'blues rhythm, the mournful horns and the boogie piano of Mr President. After a doleful elegy like Guilty (with piano figures from Beethoven), the parade carries on with two superb imitations of the Band: the country-gospel of Louisiana 1927, and the marching-band fanfare of Kingfish. Naked Man, a pseudo-ska in a circus-like atmosphere, There are few precedents of such a magic fusion of western-style symphonic harmony and amateur musichall novelties. Newman recast the art of street musicians as chamber music.

After three masterworks of that caliber, commercial success came with a mediocre satire of bigots, Short People, and with the catchy Baltimore, off Little Criminals (1977); followed by the satire of rock bands, The Story Of A Rock And Roll Band, on Born Again (1979). The former also contains Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Alfred Einstein In America and Rider In The Rain, the real gems of the era.

In the meantime, Newman had started a parallel career as soundtrack composer with Norman Lear's Cold Turkey (1971). Newman's reputation in this genre would eventually match the one as singer-songwriter, especially after Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981), Barry Levinson's The Natural (1984), Ron Howard's Parenthood (1989), that contains I Love To See You Smile, Barry Levinson's Avalon (1990), Richard Donner's Maverick (1994), John Lasseter's Toy Story (1995) and A Bug's Life (1998), Nora Ephron's Michael (1996), Gary Ross' Pleasantville (1998), and Jay Roach's Meet the Parents (2000).

Trouble In Paradise (1983) boasts his most synthetic arrangements, but doesn't live up to his early (humbler) albums. I Love L.A. apes the steel-bands of the Caribbeans, the staccato keyboards of the new wave and heavy-metal guitar solos, like a cross between VanDyke Parks and the Cars; but the result feels cold and a bit confused. His political satire Christmas In Capetown and the sarcastic gags of Blues and Mikey's drown in lakes of synthesizers, strings, guitar solos and pounding beats; while There's A Party At My House is too trivial an imitation of jump blues. The one revivalist number that works (My Life Is Good), the one caricature that is musically hilarious (I'm Different, a reggae singalong) and the one disco novelty that stirs up the dancefloor (Take Me Back) are lost in the mess. He may have wanted to update himself to the techno-rock of the age the way Frank Zappa did, but he simply proved that he was no Zappa.

Land Of Dreams (1988) is even less biting: set in the 1940s, the autobiographical nostalgic homage to his roots mocks the evils of the century in Dixie Flyer and New Orleans Wins The War, but without the polemical charge of yesteryear (exceptions are Roll With The Punches and It's Money That Matters) and instead with indeed a hint of patriotism (Follow The Flag). The arrangements, which mix ragtime and synthesizer, reach peaks of aestheticism and contribute to tarnish the image of the misanthropic Newman of the early records.

Lonely At The Top (1987) is an anthology. The rock opera Faust (1995), basically, continues the story that Newman had barely sketched in God's Song. It is a spoof of Goethe's masterpiece, but it also stands on its own as a philosophical meditation. Thanks to a superstar cast (Newman himself as the Devil, Don Henley as Faust, James Taylor as God, Elton John as an angel, Linda Ronstadt Bonnie Raitt), Newman concocts a set of impeccable compositions that, as usual, run the gamut from gospel (Glory Train) to country (Gainesville), from rock'n'roll (Happy Ending) to simply enjoyable melodies (Bless The Children Of The World, Little Island), and possibly includes Newman's best pop ballad ever, Feels Like Home.

Bad Love (Dreamworks, 1999) is a delicious song cycle, but clearly done by a master whose main interest is elsewhere. A few vignettes work as well as ever (Shame, The World Isn't Fair), others simply tag along.

After several film soundtracks (mostly for animated movies), Newman returned to the pop song with Harps and Angels (2008), a highly political concept that succeeds only in the mock-elegiac lullaby A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, in the mock-nostalgic swing Easy Street, and especially in the mock Dixieland jazz Only a Girl. The mock-heroic orchestrations are largely wasted on languid, lazy ballads.

Dark Matter (Nonesuch, 2017), the first album in nine years, is certainly not revolutionary but nobody can toy with old-time styles like he does, and nobody else can manipulate an orchestra in his evil manner. The eight-minute The Great Debate is a mini Broadway opera that samples a dozen genres, from gospel to ragtime. Newman is a lower artist when he goes for the intimate feeling, but still a genius of counterfeiting when he concocts the swinging brass-band music of It's a Jungle Out There or the cartoonish blues litany Sonny Boy (retelling the true story of the two Sonny Boy Williamsons), or when he evokes the dancehalls of the 1950s in On the Beach and the old musichall in Putin, one of his most hilarious satires.

Newman then scored Noah Baumbach's films The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) and Marriage Story (2019).