Randy Newman is, in no particular order, a crank, an Oscar-winning film-score composer—if you, like me, were bawling through Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, you might have missed the orchestration—and the singer of a No. 2 hit about someone’s random antipathy for short people.
Why, you might wonder, would someone arbitrarily hate short people? Why would someone arbitrarily hate anybody? If you got it, you got Randy Newman. And if you thought it was funny, you were his ideal listener.
He wrote another masterpiece about someone who loves Los Angeles and shouts out to the worst streets. (Century Boulevard, Victory Boulevard, and Santa Monica Boulevard are roads to nowhere.) But Newman is from L.A. and never left, though the 10 summers in New Orleans sank in. He talks like a grumpy Angeleno and sings like Dr. John’s weirdo cousin.
Is Randy Newman freaky? One of his most beloved songs, “Sail Away,” has a soaring melody and stunning string arrangement—Newman did his own—from the perspective of a slave trader. He’s trying to sell these people on the glories of America, all for the 1619 Project. Who else would write that? Maybe if Brecht and Weill were around for the singer-songwriter era.
He even contemplated the sex appeal of Vladimir Putin:
And when he takes his shirt off
He drives the ladies crazy
When he takes his shirt off
Makes me wanna be a lady
He also wrote a song about Donald Trump, but it was too vulgar, even for him.
Visually, he’s a shapeless, myopic, jowly mess of a man who never seemed to realize that people could see him. A Dionysian rock god he is not. He looks exactly like the source of these brilliant, messed-up songs, a behind-the-scenes guy who improbably found himself in front of the camera.
Most pop songs are love songs. Not Randy Newman’s. He writes cycles of contempt; he is a maestro of malice, a bard of bile. It’s as if Ray Charles, Scott Joplin, and George Gershwin were in conspiracy with Nathanael West and Mark Twain. He is, in many ways, the Mark Twain of rock ’n’ roll—he weaponized the language of racism to show how ugly it really is.
In Robert Hilburn’s A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, we learn that Newman, whose lyrics are like rancid short stories and whose melodies are like satirical mini-symphonies, even created a character, Johnny Cutler, an assembly-line worker in Birmingham who wanted to make America great again 50 years ago. It turns out that Newman’s character studies have fictional characters behind them.
Cutler gave us “Rednecks” after seeing segregationist governor Lester Maddox storming off the Dick Cavett show. Cutler thinks that the northern white man shouldn’t be so smug and self-satisfied. But we also know that Cutler is an idiot—he thinks Cavett is a smart-ass New York Jew. (Cavett is about as Jewish as the von Trapp family.)
Randy Newman is, in many ways, the Mark Twain of rock ’n’ roll—he weaponized the language of racism to show how ugly it really is.
Newman appears to have had an average first marriage and another average, second marriage to a younger wife (a 21-year-old Cal State student who took the edge off his two-and-a-half-year bout with Epstein-Barr in the mid-80s), and he seemed to enjoy being a parent. But in those songs, he sure could hate. There is a song called “God’s Song,” and the title character is a real prick.
At the risk of being a mark, some of his songs are so full of beauty and melancholy, I want to believe in them. “Real Emotional Girl” really is about a woman too fragile for this world; ditto for “Same Girl.” And “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” really is about poverty—and it was lovely enough for Nina Simone and Dusty Springfield to find their way to it in an irony-free zone. The craft is impeccable, and the suffering is right there on the surface, no sugar coating, no sentimentality:
Broken windows and empty hallways
Pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it’s going to rain today
Newman is the nephew of three successful film-score composers. One of them, Alfred, wrote 200 scores with nine Oscars and 45 nominations. Newman, who scored Ragtime, The Natural, and Avalon, also cashed in on Pixar franchises. Many young people know the songs of Toy Story without the darkness and complexity. Their parents might explain that he’s also this other guy, our misanthropic id.
After decades of Oscar nominations, he finally won in 2002, for “If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc.; onstage to accept his award, he stared into the camera and said, “I don’t want your pity.” When he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, he said that he hoped he wouldn’t be kicked out.
His chords come out of ragtime, and his dark character studies are in the Sondheim stratosphere, akin to Steely Dan if he bothered to notice. Newman has given access to Hilburn, a retired Los Angeles Times music critic who wrote biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon. He peels layers, but what then? More layers? On “I Love L.A.,” you feel Newman really does love L.A., but then he sings this:
Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man
He’s down on his knees
You can’t enjoy life too long in a Randy Newman song.
The title of Hilburn’s book comes from a late-career gem, and the speaker isn’t some invented narrative device but Newman himself. Before he recorded the song, he sat at that piano with the Oscars behind him, went on YouTube, and remarked that when he was in Europe during the peak of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he noticed that the world didn’t respect Americans anymore. His response was to offer a defense that wasn’t a defense at all:
The end of an empire
Is messy at best
And this empire’s ending
Like all the rest
Like the Spanish Armada
Adrift on the sea
We’re adrift in the land of the brave
And the home of the free
Randy Newman is always joking and dead serious at the same time. When he performed “Louisiana 1927” at a benefit for Hurricane Katrina victims, it was hard to hold back the tears. There’s so much hatred and stupidity out there, but then there are the people who have to suffer because those levees broke, and then they keep breaking, washing away the city he loved so much. He sang it and played it.
The consistency of his work is remarkable, all the way to his most recent album, Dark Matter (2017). Newman, 80, is going through a rough old age, enduring surgery after surgery, hoping he can pull it together for another score, another album. He’s still got it, but he’s not so sure about this country, which has been a muse for his poison pen for all these unforgiving years.
“For years, people talked about how the country was in trouble and falling apart, but I never quite believed it,” he said recently. “Now I have some doubts.”
David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He writes about music and is the author, most recently, of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. You can read his Substack here
