Newman isn’t afraid of the dark
At first glance, Donald Trump seems like a great character for a Randy Newman song.
Newman, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who takes the stage at the Uptown Theatre in Napa on Friday, Oct. 6, and hits San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival on Sunday, Oct. 8, has had a dual career: composer of beloved film scores and songs for Pixar family favorites like the “Toy Story” series and “Monsters, Inc.,” and American music’s satirist in chief.
But for his newest collection, “Dark Matter,” his first album in nine years, the president is absent. Newman said he’d started writing a song (the chorus, he has said previously, went: “What a dick!”), but its belowthe-belt content never felt right.
“It was during the campaign, with all of the big-hands, little-hands stuff,” he says. “It would have overshadowed everything on the album, and it wasn’t a good enough song for that.”
There is one song with a contemporary political figure, however, and it’s devoted to the third major player in last year’s presidential election, Vladimir Putin — and it was written more than two years ago, before all the hacking and the “fake news.”
“It was the whole shirt-off thing,” he says. “I don’t understand him. He’s the richest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world, and he wants to be Tom Cruise. And the song didn’t end up being that mean to him.”
“Dark Matter” could have easily been a collection of satirical takes on the modern maladies of government, but Newman’s songs have rarely been about “easy” jabs, the types of jokes that make up late-night monologues or playground taunts. Instead, they find home in satirizing ideas or, in the case of Putin, what makes individuals tick.
In that light, does the current president warrant a song?
“His ideas deserve one,” Newman says. “If 40 million people voted for him, there aren’t 40 million people worse than him. But there may be that many who still hold on to some residual version of racism.”
So it’s ideas that kick off the album. An eight-minute epic, “The Great Debate,” imagines a showdown between the forces of science and religion, marking a change for the 73-year-old singer-songwriter. Long known for assuming unreliable narrator characters on songs like “Short People” and the Southern concept album “Good Old Boys,” Newman sings from multiple perspectives on “The Great Debate” — the moderator and voices representing both sides (religion wins, in the end, for the simple reason that nothing can quite compare to gospel music).
“The song demanded it,” he says. “I needed to have all of the voices there, so I had to do it, and just work hard to make them all make sense.”
One of those narrators even calls out Newman himself, with a line that takes the cynic’s view of the songwriter’s work: “You see, the author of the little vignette, Mr. Newman/ A self-described atheist and commonist/ creates objects like you/ as objects of ridicule.”
“Maybe it’ll be the way I end my career,” he jokes, adding that it’s akin to a magician telling secrets. “‘That’s how the trick works!’ ”
Still, while the big ideas lead off the album, its heart might be “Lost Without You,” which deals with issues of dying and those left behind. Inspired by deaths in his family and the aftermath he’s witnessed, Newman sings of a woman on her deathbed, a husband struggling to cope and offspring seeing a dark side to their father, perhaps for the first time.
This “dark matter” may be a bit too dark for his Northern California performances, though.
“I’m not sure I can play that live too often, because I can’t get the audience back,” he says. “It’s just too depressing to rip right into ‘Short People’ right after it.”