Rock byRichard Cook
"Perhaps," says Randy Newman, "I'm a short-story writer who got stuck with being a musician." There's surely no more literate, smarter man working the old singer-songwriter furrow, either back then - the 1970s, when he produced several of the masterpieces of the LP song-cycle - or now, when Bad Love (Dreamworks) slips unassumingly in among the new releases, his first such record for ten years. Being literate and smart, however, suggests some kind of high - or highfalutin - art. Newman always resists the idea that his is an intellectual pursuit, even though he likes the craft of it and admires the best work of contemporaries whom one might have thought he'd cock a snook at.
Isn't this the merciless assassin of Bruce Springsteen's music on "My Life Is Good", the guy who got Fleetwood Mac to sing back-up on "I Love LA"? Absolutely, except Newman does actually love Los Angeles and its attendant neuroses. One of the biggest hoots on the new record is "I'm Dead", a slap-down of every 50-plus rocker still out there harrumphing their way through the old, old moves (the opening lines are "I've got nothing to say, but I'm going to say it anyway", to a backdrop of Foreigner and Cheap Trick riffs). Instead of opting for the pure satirist's cool detachment, though, Newman sympathises. He knows how these people feel, even if he isn't quite one of them, any more than he is one of the rednecks, child molesters, closet gays or cynical deities who have peopled his other songs.
One of his favourite themes is misanthropic love, and he's never done it better than he has here with "Shame", almost a monologue by a wealthy old creep with bad joints down on his knees for a 19-year-old girl. Newman's signature is his refusal to judge such people. If it weren't for them, he wouldn't have much to write about. And he has the gall to follow that with "Every Time It Rains", something he wrote for Michael Jackson and as close as he ever comes to straight, good love. It's an area he continues to flirt with without ever exactly falling into such a tender trap. "The One You Love" and "I Miss You" are two sides of the coin here, one a strange confession of bewilderment in a relationship, the other nearly a note of regret.
Newman sings all these songs in the same growly, just-woken voice he always has, a comical instrument for those used to Michael Bolton or Michael Feinstein, the kind of singers who work a lot in the medium that butters most of Randy's bread - film soundtracks. The reason he does so few of his song records now is his in-demand status as the composer for the likes of Toy Story and A Bug's Life. Maybe, though, we are better for having fewer, finer Randy Newman records. There are moments when his humour comes out more like Tom Lehrer and, for all their ingenuity, some of the pieces here, such as "The Great Nations of Europe" and "Big Hat, Small Cattle", may not stand the kind of repetition that big, successful albums engender.
Newman's taste for idiosyncrasy is his touchstone, just off-kilter enough to keep his records honest. The music helps, too: a studio craftsman's polish, allied this time to some peculiarly roots touches by the co-producer Mitchell Froom (try the Lawrence Welk-goes-Hawaiian sound of "Better off Dead"). When he ends it with "I Want Everyone to Like Me", a revision of the song he wrote for Sinatra, "Lonely at the Top", he does it with the kind of deadpan directness that says, "I don't really mean it." Except he does. Or does he?
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