Newman’s Own
There’s still no one quite like Randy Newman.
by Michael Pelusi
(Originally published in the September 27, 2004-October 4, 2001 issue of the Philadelphia City Paper.)
On Randy Newman’s 1988 album Land of Dreams, there’s a song tucked near the end called “Follow the Flag.” It’s a brief little tune, all hymnal piano, rolling, synthesized strings and lyrics like “They say it’s all a lie/ But it’s not a lie/ I’m going to follow the flag till I die.”
It’s not one of Newman’s most memorable songs — and maybe it’s the country’s current state of distress that reminds him of it — but, talking on the phone from his home studio in L.A., he cites it as an example of his “songs that are close to the line.… I didn’t exactly mean [‘Follow the Flag’] as a straight-out patriotic song. But if I wanted to take advantage of what it is, I could. It’s so close to the line you can’t tell what it is. And that may be a mistake.”
You think?
“No,” he decides. “I want it to get close to the line.”
It has always been thus for the 57-year-old Newman. For 40-some years, he has trod the line between Hollywood craftsman and one of the most unique musical voices this country has produced; between playing for cheap laughs and going for brutal realities; between the guy who did “Short People” and “I Love L.A.” and the guy who did “Rednecks,” one of the most provocative songs by a white American male, and “Marie,” one of the most beautiful songs by anyone.
His music fuses the beautifully lush orchestrations that are in his bloodstream (he is the nephew of the late Alfred Newman, the legendary film composer from Hollywood’s golden age; additionally, he has two other uncles and two cousins in the biz) and blues-inflected piano and vocals. The lyrics are dark, often bleakly humorous, delivered by untrustworthy, deeply flawed narrators. There’s the would-be stalker of “Suzanne”; the slave-ship captain selling African natives on an America they’ll never know in “Sail Away”; the father who gently informs his son he’s abandoning the family because “I Want You to Hurt Like I Do.”
For all this, though (or perhaps because of it), Newman’s public profile is rather reductive, when not downright misrepresentative. “It’s a strange legacy to be known in much of the country as the writer of ‘Short People,’ and not winning the Academy Award [but] being nominated 14 times,” he admits. (Regarding his status at the Oscars, Newman says, “If I thought it were indicative of the worth of anything, it would bother me.” He adds: “I don’t think there’s a thousand people in the world who know a score that’s helping a picture from one that isn’t.”) And his liberal use of humor in song has thrown many a listener off, even consigning him in some minds to novelty status.
Referring to his music for films like Toy Story and The Natural, he says, “When I reach the public is when I’m the servant of someone else.” (During the interview, Newman was finishing up his score to the upcoming Disney/Pixar film Monsters, Inc., occasionally toying with a motif or two on the piano.) “I can’t write the way I normally write [in that situation].”
Breaking into a bit of Toy Story’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” he notes, “I don’t know whether on my own I could say that without sounding like a used-car salesman. “I’m proud of being able to write to assignment. I don’t have any compunction about ‘Oh, that’s not me.’ Yeah, it is me.… If Stravinsky was asked to write something for somebody’s daughter’s bat mitzvah, he’d have done it. He’d have charged them an enormous amount. People take commissions, and I’m glad I can fill them. I’m not interested in baring my soul, and I don’t think I necessarily have enormously important things to say.”
While any Newman devotee would gladly challenge that last point, it is true that he’s had little use for rock’s standard navel-gazing. Bits and pieces from his life did occasionally become song fodder, but it wasn’t till Land of Dreams that, as an experiment, Newman consciously wrote about himself on “Dixie Flyer” and “New Orleans Wins the War.”
Newman’s most recent album — not counting Rhino Records’ just released The Best of Randy Newman and the soundtrack to Meet the Parents— is the excellent Bad Love (1999), a vinegar-soaked look at the travails of aging. In “Shame,” a grizzled millionaire pines for, cajoles, threatens and begs a beauty in her 20s. (“You know I have a Lexus now,” he mutters at one point.) “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It)” was an ode to dinosaur-rock cowardice. “Each record that I’m making/ Is like a record that I’ve made/ Just not as good.”
“I wanted to see if you could use this medium to write about geriatrics,” he notes dryly. “I wasn’t sure you could, but now I am. At least I did on that [album]. It was sort of age-responsive. A lot of the songs couldn’t happen to a 25-year-old…. The guy in ‘Shame,’ a bad old guy with money wanting a 23-year-old, it was like, ‘Of course.’”
But the strongest songs on the album, arguably, were the ones where Newman dug deeper into his own life. The stately “My Country” describes Newman’s family huddled ’round the TV that is their only way to communicate. By the song’s end, the narrator wonders why his grown children visit him when “they have TVs of their own.” Most unnerving was “I Miss You,” a love song to his ex-wife so genuine it admits its own lack of tact, baldly explaining, “I’d sell my soul, and your souls, for a song/ So I’ll pour my heart out.”
These songs were not harangues: Newman sounds genuinely nostalgic for the uniting force of television, and he refuses to ignore the exploitive nature of “I Miss You” as much as he can’t ignore that he does indeed miss her. What made the songs special is what has always made Newman special: Deep down, he means it. Newman’s ironies, even his one-liners, don’t always go down easy because he’s willing to become these disreputable people, so much so that you wonder whether he’s kidding in the first place. And yet, he says, “I’ve always written for, unbelievably enough, a mass public. It’s never been that way, but that’s who I’ve written for.”
Without Newman, it’s hard to imagine both Eminem’s profanity-filled, sociopathic rants and Stephin Merritt’s martini-dry ditties forever in quotation marks. But that’s the least of his achievements. Sure, he’s not the hippest songwriter of his generation, not a sexy doomed romantic like Leonard Cohen nor a lo-fi pioneer like Tom Waits. And, yes, he wears Hawaiian shirts, hangs out with Don Henley and sells songs for commercials. But — whether assuming the voice of a racist Southerner to point out the liberal North’s hypocrisy in “Rednecks,” or only half-kiddingly proclaiming at the end of Bad Love, “I Want Everyone to Like Me” — he has, again and again, gotten close to that line. A line that, in its ambiguous mix of unpleasantries and comedy, resembles life as people actually live it.
Randy Newman performs with the Mann Festival Orchestra, Fri., Sept. 28 at the Mann Music Center, 52nd St. and Parkside Ave., 215-893-1999.
Michael Pelusi, Content Strategist 