Randy Newman explores ‘Dark Matter’
AS one of pop’s master satirists, it’s probably no surprise that for his first studio album in nine years, songwriter-composer Randy Newman has set his artistic crosshairs on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After all, this is the artist who inspired anger and protests with “Short People,” his 1977 send-up of racism. Earlier, in a takedown of duplicitous foreign policy in “Political Science,” he sarcastically suggested that the United States “drop the ‘big one,’ and see what happens.” Then there’s “I Love L.A.,” his paean to his native town that deftly wove in an allusion to this city’s homeless problem.
And now Newman has gone topical again with “Putin,” a centerpiece of his new album, “Dark Matter.”
Because of their relative scarcity, any new work from Randy Newman is an event. Since his 1968 debut, he’s released just 10 studio collections — a rate of about one every four years. That pace has slowed in the past three decades, during which he’s put out just four. Of course, there’s also his composing work, as Newman has scored more than 20 films, including Disney/ Pixar’s latest, “Cars 3.”
“Randy Newman is a national treasure,” Eagles co-founder and longtime friend Don Henley said. “He’s also probably the most misunderstood and underappreciated recording artist alive.”
“He’s one of the only living songwriters who can get ridicule and empathy into the same song. Sometimes, he works in the realm of irony; other times, he’s a heart-onhis-sleeve romantic,” Henley said. “The combination of his lyrical genius and his deep ability as an orchestrator and composer is powerful stuff. There’s nobody quite like him.
“I said when I inducted Randy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that what you hear in his music is America, in all its shame and all its glory … . He mines so many rich veins of American musical culture and synthesizes them in a way that nobody else has done.”
Newman is clearly thinking big on “Dark Matter.” The opening track, “The Great Debate,” is an 8½-minute suite, a faceoff between science and religious faith that plays out cinematically, with a narrator interacting with several distinct other points of view expressed by varied characters who are fleshed out by a shifting musical mise-en-scene.
‘What’s he want?’
In the case of “Putin,” Newman proved to be a little prescient. The song was written long before reports of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election came to light and well ahead of President Donald Trump regularly voicing admiration for the Russian leader.
“It’s really not that critical of him — that’s what surprises me,” Newman,
73, said recently, sitting at a shaded picnic table in the backyard of the
Pacific Palisades home he has shared with his wife, Gretchen, and children for the past 20 years.
The house is in the same neighborhood where he spent much of his childhood.
“Putin” began a few years ago, but Newman was less interested in the leader’s policies. Instead, Newman zeroed in on what he saw as a quest for fame, as inspiration struck when images of the shirtless EX-KGB officer riding a horse around the Russian countryside began to circulate on the internet.
“He can drive his giant tractor across the TransSiberian plain/he can power a nuclear reactor with the left side of his brain,” he sings.
“I wondered at it : What does he need with that — why? He’s the richest man there is. He’s the most powerful. What’s he want?” Newman said, also revealing the seemingly insatiable curiosity that compels him to keep writing and recording nearly 40 years after the release of his strikingly idiosyncratic debut album, “Randy Newman” (subtitled “Something New Under the Sun”).
His conclusion about Putin’s public braggadocio: “I think he also wants to be Tom Cruise. He wants to be like a movie star — a superhero, a strongman.
“There are videos of him throwing bigger young men around,” Newman said. “It interested me, but it also worried me. It’s an oddly baby-ish sort of behavior … .”
Playing himself
Among the outlandish characters on “Dark
Matter”? Randy Newman himself.
In “The Great Debate,” he calls out for the “untrustworthy narrator”
— a device he’s often employed throughout his career, which has netted him two Academy Awards, six Grammys and three Emmys, among other accolades.
In “The Great Debate,” a character called True Believer outright castigates the song’s narrator: “Sir, do you know what you are? You’re an idiot, you’re a straw man, a fabrication.
You see, the author of this little vignette, Mr. Newman, a self-described atheist and commonist, creates characters like you as objects of ridicule.”
It adds a layer of richness to the tale, in which scientists debate religious folks over topics such as dark matter, evolution and global warming, all hot-button issues in today’s world of divisive political discourse.
“You start to think, ‘Well, this guy’s got an open mind’ and then he just gets mowed down by the power of the stuff connected with religiosity, with faith, because it’s just mighty,” said Newman, who does indeed consider himself an agnostic, if perhaps not a full-blown atheist.
Newman’s not-so-secret weapon in each of his songs is the music he supplies for the words of his narrators, a wealthy amalgam of pop and classical source material. Here, he taps the blues, gospel, folk, ragtime, chamber and symphonic music, referencing at various points Aaron Copland, Gustav Mahler, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alban Berg and film composers.
His biggest influence from the last, he said, would be his uncle, Academy Awardwinning Alfred Newman, probably the best known of his three composer-uncles, who also include Emil and Lionel Newman.
He believes the canvas of pop music doesn’t have to be limited, structurally, thematically or sonically — although albums as creatively expansive as
“Dark Matter” don’t often top sales charts.
“You can do it,” he said. “When I first began writing this way, with characters in it, I always wondered why more people didn’t do it. And I think maybe it’s because it’s not a great idea for the medium (of pop music). Maybe it’s meant to be a direct I-love-you, youlove-me kind of medium.
“But you can do this other stuff, and it comes off,” he said. “And I have such an affection for comedy, that I like to laugh and I like to make people laugh, so I do it.”