Just the way Randy Newman hits the piano can make you cry. For example, on his first album, 1968, with “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today”. He’s not actually a singer, but that’s exactly why the words hit you like particularly sharp arrows – as if he were throwing them directly at your head.
On November 28th, Randall Stuart Newman will be 80 years old, and so it can be said here again: There will probably be no songwriter like him again – so smart, so funny. There was never anyone like him. “I miss you/ I’m sorry but I do,” Randy Newman once sang to his ex-wife while he was long married to someone else. And I already miss him, even though he’s still alive.
He recently had to repeatedly cancel his planned concerts – first because of the pandemic, then because he broke his neck. No joke! But of course he made a fuss about it: “I thought I was shrinking, maybe as revenge for ‘Short People’,” he wrote to explain that the operation had been successful: “I now look less like an anteater and more like one Folk rock artist from the early 60s.” He can’t travel for the time being.
Keen observer
Randy Newman was all over the place in his songs, and he spared no one. Not yourself, but not others either. Just a few examples in which he held up a merciless mirror to the world: In “Political Science” he wanted to bomb the entire world because it doesn’t like America (“We’ll save Australia/ Don’t want to hurt no kangaroo” ). On the same album, “Sail Away” (1972), things got even nastier in “Last Night I Had a Dream”: “I saw a vampire/ I saw a ghost/ Everybody scared me but you scared me the most.” Whoever wants to hear something like that about yourself?
The more private pieces often surpass the political satires in terms of ingenuity. Of course, “Rednecks” (1974) is never boring, but first the impact of the family catastrophe “A Wedding In Cherokee County”! Today, pieces like (the somewhat banal) “Short People” (1977) would have to be provided with warnings or winking smileys.
If you ignore “Korean Parents” (2008) and “Putin” (2017), the last great mockeries were “Bad Love” (1999). “The Great Nations Of Europe” and “The World Isn’t Fair” sum up the 20th century quite well, “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It)” dissects the cruelty of aging. But the hardest part comes in “My Country”. Newman talks about the adult children whose visit you look forward to and who you should listen to. “And much as I love them/ I’m always kind of glad when they go away.”
More from Birgit Fuss
Is it allowed to be so honest – even if it is distorted from a literary point of view? Can you seriously sing “I want you to hurt like I do”? Randy Newman can do it because he has looked closely at people – and no matter what he tells us, the world is still a little more evil than his sickest songs.
Maybe that’s why there’s so much laughter at his concerts: we sense that the worst is yet to come. But today we wish the great Randy Newman all the best – and a few more appearances where he can play some of his wonderful pieces. “I’d sell my soul and your souls for a song…”