And his playing is always quite astounding – intricate, sometimes thundering, complex arrangements set against beautiful melodies. When we talk about his songs, he frequently starts playing and singing to make a point. Like many musicians, his thoughts are musical as often as they are verbal. Randy, ever the pragmatist, offers a less rosy conclusion: “I think Greg’s suffocated. When he’s then asked to play and offers no response, the engineer reasons that his headphones are off.
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(“They’re leather or something,” Randy informs me.) As the trio tries repeatedly to nail down the track, Cohen’s having trouble hearing the soft voice of his bass, so Froom and the engineer swiftly construct a makeshift isolation booth around him out of baffles and tarp. His music rarely requires a simple backbeat groove – far from it – and Pete is intricately repeating the complex and shifting rhythms of the song’s various sections, colored resonantly by his use of 1920s-era drum -heads. With Randy on piano, the three musicians are united in trying to lay down a basic track for “Laugh and Be Happy,” a song which advises a mindlessly mirthful escape from the turmoil of modern times. Elvis Costello’s drummer Pete Thomas is at the skins today and Greg Cohen, best known for playing with Tom Waits, is on the acoustic bass.
Today he’s got not one, but two, legendary producers steering the session-his oldest friend Lenny Waronker, who produced many of his classic first albums – and Mitchell Froom, who was at the helm of Bad Love.
#RANDY NEWMAN LITTLE CRIMINALS RARELY MOVIE#
Now, freed from specific movie strictures, he’s liberated by the unchained possibilities. And they’ve also served to lessen his dread of the process years ago he confessed to feeling like a student forever looking to the school clock when bound to the piano in songwriting mode. Though his fans have long worried that his extensive film work would detract from his own songwriting, recent songs such as the “A Piece of the Pie” or “Korean Parents” suggest that the years spent in cinematic trenches have only expanded his musical expression. His music is as sophisticated as his lyrics – and even when he brings us the blues, as on the title song and others on the new album, he does it with richly dimensional orchestral arrangements that no other songwriter, with the notable exception of Van Dyke Parks, could singlehandedly create. There’s nobody like him, and never has been. New masterpieces such as “Potholes” shine as brightly as his greatest songs, from “Political Science” and “Sail Away” to “The World Isn’t Fair,” all of which seem way too smart and funny for mass consumption, but for which we rejoice. He’s at once one of America’s most serious and hilarious songwriters. With untrustworthy and often pinheaded narrators at the wheel of his songs, he’s not only inverted the conventionally direct methodology of singer/songwriters, he’s done so with a remarkable fusion of humor and pathos. As those in the know know, this gap isn’t because he’s been lounging, but because he’s been busily and often furiously employed writing movie songs and scores, as his famous uncles, Alfred and Lionel Newman, did before him.īut today he’s back in the role where most of us have come to know him – as one of America’s most revered and iconoclastic songwriters, a man who has solitarily created an entire school of songwriting which others have attended but from which they’ve rarely graduated, the college of character-driven songwriting. Today he’s at a place where he always seems most at home: the keys of a grand piano, his chords crashing and cascading, in a spacious Hollywood recording studio, cutting tracks for what is his first album in nine years, Harps and Angels. Randy Newman Up Above Hollywood, Where He Belongs
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