Newman back to share his thoughts
Randy Newman returns with his unique perspective
Finally, at 73, Randy Newman has written a straightforward, autobiographical love song, right? She Chose Me, a ballad on Dark Matter, his first album in nine years, opens with lush strings, a torch-song piano and his gumboish croon.
This had to be for your wife, he’s told. Gretchen is inside the house they built together. Newman is sitting out back on a clear morning. He’s joined by an old friend, record producer Lenny Waronker.
“Probably,” he says. “Since I wrote one (1999’s I Miss You) to my first wife, this one’s for her.”
That would be a perfect way to leave it, but Newman reconsiders.
“Even though I didn’t know her when I wrote it, I don’t think,” he continues. “I wrote it … I hope this doesn’t affect me getting the Academy Award for this one, but I wrote it for Cop Rock.”
That would be the TV musical police drama that lasted one season in 1990. It’s actually possible he wrote She Chose Me for both. Cop Rock premièred in September of that year. He and Gretchen were married a month later.
“I just wrote it,” Newman says finally, and laughs. “I’m a professional songwriter. I don’t need a wife.”
In the almost 50 years he’s been recording, he has been able to create a stunning body of work by staying in character. His first-person portraits of the heartbroken, heartbreaking and misunderstood and his political satires, have earned him a loyal following, the admiration of his peers and the occasional controversy. His lone top-10 hit, 1977’s Short People, confused enough people, who didn’t get the satire against bigotry, to inspire protests and an attempt in the Maryland legislature to ban it.
Dark Matter includes arrangements that could carry one of Frank Sinatra’s Nelson Riddle records. There are narratives told in the voices of the Kennedys, bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson and Vladimir Putin, and a closer, Wandering Boy, that’s achingly sad.
There is also the album’s leadoff track, an epic called The Great Debate. It is what it sounds like: Scientists on one side, true believers on the other, arguments over climate change, evolution and religion.
“It’s a crazy way to start a record, an eight-minute song that goes to all these places,” says Mitchell Froom, the album’s co-producer. “But it’s stunning.”
In the old days, record-company grunts would be nagging Newman for the next record. These days, he’s on his own clock. He works in a broken industry, in which even an artist’s dream label such as Nonesuch has its limits. Newman contributed about $20,000 to help pay to record Dark Matter.
“It is important to serve the songs as best I can,” he says. “And if I think I need a few more guys, and they won’t pay for it, I do. If it needs it, it needs it.”
Ask Newman about legacy, and you’ll get a mix of modesty, frustration and pride. He takes pride in his approach, to listen to and watch the behaviour of others. He’s always found other people’s stories more interesting.
Newman watched segregationist (and then Georgia governor) Lester Maddox on The Dick Cavett Show before writing 1974’s Rednecks, sung from the point of view of a Southerner with a scathing view of Northern racism.
Waronker was struck by Newman’s curiosity from the start.
“Once,” Waronker says, “we were in New York. … Randy was 19. I must have been 22, or even younger. One night he said, ‘I’m going out.’ And he comes back around midnight or a little later. I said ‘Where did you go?’ He said, ‘I just took a cab ride.’ And I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘I just liked talking to the cab driver.’
“It’s these things — not only does he see the interesting part of different people coming from different places, but he is able to understand them and become them.”
“I remember that cab driver,” Newman cuts in and laughs. “I remember what he had to say. It was terrible stuff about women, mostly. … He kept going and going and going, and, uh, actually I wanted to get out, but I couldn’t exactly get out where I was.”
Amos Newman, his oldest son, thinks his father’s songs are often deeply personal, even if they’re in the voice of someone else.
“There’s a song called Memo to My Son, which is, ostensibly, about me,” he says.
“At the time, I might have been the only child. Then there’s The World Isn’t Fair and My Life Is Good, which is clearly not him, but it’s his perspective. There’s a thing on there about taking his kids to private school, and he sees the mothers there. The mothers dressed up ready for the night: diamond pearls, whatever it was. There clearly are things that are from his own observations and his own experiences.”
Newman wrote Putin, a comic take on the Russian leader, more than two years ago, long before the election-tampering news cycle. He was inspired by “the shirt-off stuff, the whole part of his personality that apparently wants to be … the richest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world … and wants to be Tom Cruise. He wants to be a star.”
Brothers came out of his desire to consider the relationship not just between the Kennedys, but brothers in general.
There are a pair of songs about those who are lost. On the Beach is about a high school friend who drifts away. Wandering Boy is the story of a child who disappears from his father’s life. When he’s asked about the song, Newman chokes up, a reaction he admits later, surprises him.
“I don’t know why, but when something like that happens, reason tells me it’s about yourself,” he says. “I think I imagine having lost a kid. … I imagine that, and I imagine a guy I went to school with who ended up on skid row or on the beach, wherever he was staying, who fell out. The idea of falling out has always been interesting to me.”