Tuesday Playlist: Randy Newman

I've got dinner in the oven as I type this, so today's post will be somewhat brief — which makes me sad, because I come here to sing the praises of one Randall Stuart Newman, a singer-songwriter whose inestimable gifts have been so abundantly proven over the last 60 years or so that it honestly offends me on a personal level that so few people have availed themselves of the opportunity to explore his work beyond the handful of tunes — marvelous though they may be — that have penetrated the public consciousness during his career.

I could write for miles about Randy Newman is what I'm saying, and yet on this particular day, I lack the time to do so. This is probably your gain, honestly, because while I have long been and remain an ardent Newman evangelist, I am also able to recognize that for many, his work is something of an acquired taste, albeit for reasons I will never understand or agree with, and I've probably ruined enough parties by trying to enlighten the unconverted. (I guess this should probably also include the party I attended with one spectacularly drunk fellow who refused to believe I was actually a Randy Newman fan, and spent days afterwards telling anyone who'd listen that I was definitely fucking with him. Sir, I assure you, I was not.)

As I've said previously, I have, in recent weeks, been enjoying Robert Hilburn's new book, the descriptively titled A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman. In most cases, I find it fairly presumptuous for a writer to call something like this THE biography rather than A biography, but in all likelihood, this is the one and only time anyone will spend years of their life writing about all the years of Randy's life, so we can give Hilburn a pass. Somewhat less forgivable is Hilburn's decision to treat his subject with a level of reverence typically reserved for the dead. Again, I am a massive Rand fan, and I have to admit that I think Hilburn makes his case pretty persuasively here, but you still come away with the impression that Newman is just as unimpeachably brilliant as a human being as he is a songwriter, and I question the necessity and/or wisdom of this approach.

On the other hand, Hilburn keeps his kid gloves on largely by focusing on the music, which is 99.95 percent marvelous anyway. I suspect he probably had no other choice, given that Newman has always been a pretty reticent interview subject, and now that he's playing the back nine of his life, it's unlikely that anyone would go on record with a biography author about what an asshole he is, even if that were actually the case. Whatever the reasons, the end result is an extremely gentle yet also entertainingly informative overview of a tremendous artist's life and times, from his youth as a junior member of a legendary music family to his years as perhaps America's longest-running undeclared poet laureate.

"What about Bob Dylan?" you might be saying. "What about Smokey Robinson?" And yes, those guys are both brilliant, and also both deeply woven into the cultural lexicon of our times — but I would argue, while fully understanding that this will strike some as a foolishly contrarian argument, that Newman's discography is far more consistent than either of those two. He hasn't been anywhere near as prolific, but if we're talking quality over quantity, Newman reigns supreme; some of his records sound more dated than others, but he's really never released a bad album. (I'm not even taking his many film scores into account.)

I have to admit I wouldn't always have made this argument. For a long time, I had little use for Newman's first album (too orchestral) and had a tough time with his '80s output (waaaaayyy too many synths), and held fast to Sail Away, Good Old Boys, and Little Criminals as the far-and-away apex of his recording career. That may actually be objectively true to some extent, but even during the synthy '80s, Newman was writing and recording some of the most biting social commentary of the rock era, and since ending the 11-year hiatus that fell between 1988's Land of Dreams and 1999's Bad Love, he's delivered some of his strongest work, period.

Here's what I really want to say before the oven timer beeps: Randy Newman is so much more — so much more — than "Short People" or "I Love to See You Smile" or, for goodness' sake, "You've Got a Friend in Me." He's spent decades holding a brilliantly, unforgivably crystal-clear mirror up to the American psyche, commenting on the best and worst of who we are with biting wit and striking emotional depth. There's never been another artist like him, and I doubt we'll ever see the likes of him again once he's gone. I hope he still has another album or two in him, but in the meantime, here's a playlist collecting nearly four and a half hours of my favorite cuts from his catalog as it currently stands. Enjoy!