Randy Newman (1943) has been earning his living for years composing soundtracks for blockbusters such as Toy Story and Meet the Parents. Wouter Bulckaert doesn’t like it much: too good, too meek. He is therefore briefly about it in Randy Newman, a passionate biography of the American’s music career. He cares about that other Newman, the writer and singer of songs like Lonely At The Top, God’s Song and Rednecks, full of irony and with a hilarious top layer under which it rubs uncomfortably. Not only does Newman make fun of his characters, he also shows empathy. Bulckaert even calls him ‘a humanist par excellence, who expresses both the deepest desires of his country and the disillusionment therein’.
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