Can We Talk About Randy Newman?
I feel like I have this same conversation every few months—I’m with somebody who has good taste in music and books and we are having a good chat about social issues, art, intellectual pursuits, etc. and I mention Randy Newman, and they say, “I’m not familiar.”
“Yes you are,” I say.
“No…I don’t know that name.”
“But you know Randy Newman. You maybe just don’t know you do.”
And then I have to do that thing. That thing that I, as a devoted fan, hate to do. I sing a few bars of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”
“Oh! Yeah—wait, what?”
Invariably, whatever we were just talking about that made me bring up Randy Newman—colonialism, Karl Marx, Putin, the Cuyahoga River, Darwin, atheism—invariably, the thread doesn’t make any sense in the context of Pixar music. And that’s fair. So now, I have to stop and explain. I bring up “Short People,” maybe—or “I Love L.A.” or “You Can Leave Your Hat On” (“oh, from 9 1/2 weeks? That was him?” “No, that was Joe Cocker, but Randy Newman wrote it.”) Maybe “I Love to See You Smile” from the movie Parenthood. Or…”You know, he was the singing bush in Three Amigos.” At this point, all hope is lost…No idea where we were.
When you find a fellow traveler who loves Randy Newman, you’ve found a kindred spirit. It’s painful to have to distill this body of work to a few movie soundtracks—no matter how amazing those movie tracks might be. On the other hand, if all he had ever done was movie scores and soundtracks, it would be a hell of a career. The man has been nominated for 22 Academy Awards, although he’s lost twenty times.
But Randy Newman’s oeuvre extends so much further . . . Consider his 1995 reworking of Goethe’s Faust. The cast is mind-blowing: Randy Newman, James Taylor, Don Henley, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, and Bonnie Raitt?!! Seriously? How does everybody not know this album/production/opera?
On his last album, Newman opens with a track called “The Great Debate”—ostensibly a debate arena considering weighty issues like Dark Matter and Evolution with a team of leading scientists on one side, and a team of theologians on the other. When asked to explain “Dark Matter” (also the album’s title), the scientists are forced to admit that although they believe it to be “75% of everything,” they also “don't know what it is, don't know where it is, and can't get any.” When asked for their counter, the theologians break into a gospel chorus, singing “I’ll take Jesus every time!”
The next topic posed to the “Great Debate” is evolution:
"The giraffe, to survive, must eat leaves high up on the Yabba Yabba tree.
That's true, isn't it? But Mr. Darwin's giraffe, the halfway-giraffe, with a halfway-giraffe neck
Could never have reached the highest branches of the Yabba Yabba.
Therefore, he could not have survived.
It's only common sense.
Unfortunately for you, Mr. Charles Darwin didn't have any common sense.
Evolution is a theory, and we have just now, tonight, disproved it."The theologians? Again, they break into a gospel chorus, singing “I’ll take Jesus every time!” Newman’s moderator deems this a score of two to one for theology vs. science and moves on to the topic of Global Warming. Let me stop here, and remind you —this is the opening track of an album of what is ostensibly pop music from the composer of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” But at THIS POINT—one of Newman’s characters breaks the fourth wall? Except we aren’t on a stage, so there isn’t a wall to break—the whole thing just becomes very meta as one of the theologians addresses . . . well, it’s not exactly clear who is being addressed in this large cast all voiced by Randy Newman at this point, but the theologian interrupts the song to say this:
“Sir, do you know what you are?
You're an idiot. You're a strawman, a fabrication
You see, the author of this little vignette, Mr. Newman,
Self-described atheist and communist, creates characters, like you
As objects of ridicule.
He doesn't believe anything he has you say,
Nor does he want us to believe anything you say.
Makes it easy for him to knock you down, hence, a strawman.
I, myself, believe in Jesus.
I believe in evolution, also. I believe in global warming, and in life everlasting.
No one can knock me down.”
This is track one. Of one album. Only his most recent. Not even a particularly popular album—how do you condense this work into a short and comprehensible narrative for the uninitiated? I’m always at a loss. People don’t want to hear, “Well, you really need to go listen to at least twenty songs so you’ll kind of understand his worldview and what he’s putting out there.” So you just sing a few bars of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”
I think a great place to start is the album The Randy Newman Songbook Volume One. This is the first of a three-volume retrospective of his work, but here’s the catch—it’s just Randy Newman at the piano. No accompaniment. Very raw, stripped down versions of his hand-picked songs. We begin with “It’s Lonely at the Top,” a song that he intended for Frank Sinatra, but which Sinatra would never have agreed to sing, of course:
“All the applause / All the parades / And all the money I have made / Oh, it’s lonely at the top
Listen all you fools out there / Go on and love me, I don’t care / Oh, it’s lonely at the top.”
This track is followed with “God’s Song,” where Newman, a self-described atheist, assumes the voice of God and mocks human frailty:
“I burn down your cities — how blind you must be. / I take from you your children, and you say, ‘How Blessed are We.’ / Y’all must be crazy to put your faith in me. / That’s why I love mankind.”
Newman’s biting, acerbic satire is clever. It’s provocative. It’s intelligent. It’s also just a small piece of the picture. I listened to the Tiny Desk Concert he did for NPR again the other night—after I had one of these conversations with someone “unfamiliar” with his work. He starts the concert with the hilarious track “Putin” from his most recent album:
“Putin puttin his pants on - one leg at a time. You mean he’s like a regular fella, huh? He ain’t NOTHING like a regular fella…”
There’s a chorus or two with the “Putin Girls,” of whom Putin disapproves because of vulgarity. I’m watching this, and I’m in stitches, and then he moves to the next song—”She Chose Me.” And just like that — tears are rolling down my cheeks. I’m a bit of a sap, so it’s not THAT hard to do, but to change gears that quickly—that’s the mark of a true artist:
“I'm not much to talk to and I know how I look
What I know about life comes out of a book
But of all of the people, there are in the world
She chose me
Most of my life, been on my own
Whatever I did, I did it alone
And then she came along, now I'm not alone
Since she chose me
Every night I thank the lucky stars above me
That someone as beautiful as she could really love me
And she really loves me
From time to time, I ask myself
Why was it I and nobody else?
The most beautiful girl that I'd ever seen
And she chose me.”
Friends, do yourselves a favor. Take some time, and soak up the work of Randy Newman. All of it—and it will take you some time to do so. But you’ll be glad you did. He might very well be the greatest living American songwriter. Tom Waits has become less and less accessible in the last twenty years. Randy Newman is pretty much as he always has been—a little more hunched over, maybe.
