He was always an artist who deserved more than cult fame. Randy Newman, 55, is the living, singing embodiment of a mixture of William Faulkner and Norman Rockwell. One of the great songwriters of middle America, he has just released his first studio record in 10 years.
The album, Bad Love, reveals - from the cover to the song titles - several reasons why Newman has remained a critics' favourite but not a public favourite throughout his 30-year recording career. On the CD cover, he looks like a man whose life has all but passed him by, a successful yet inherently mournful person who might own a Lexus but who just doesn't have the will to manoeuvre it too far from his stone-crunching, mile-long drive.
Then there are the song titles: Shame, I'm Dead (But I Don't Know It), Every Time It Rains, The World Isn't Fair, Better Off Dead and I Miss You. Best of all is I Want Every- one To Like Me, a song title which captures the sense of hangdog insecurity that adorns the CD cover. No wonder his records don't sell millions of copies.
That said, the superb Bad Love has been on the receiving end of the usual critical plaudits. Newman has also changed record labels - from Reprise to Dreamworks - and this, alongside his by now recognised status as one of the most Oscar-nominated and successful film scorers of the past 15 years, might well mark a turning point.
"Record sales are a problem for me," confirms Randy Newman, who started off his career at 17 as a $50-a-month staff songwriter for Liberty Records. "While it may be delusional on my part, Bad Love seems accessible to me. There's nothing hard or difficult about it. If there is, it could be down to the lack of knowledge I have about the marketplace. I don't know where I fit in, commercially. I'll sell about 50,000 records in the US, so not that many people will know who I am.
"On a qualitative assessment I guess I'd be included, but you have to make more noise in sales to get a Grammy. In the long run, it doesn't concern me at all, but lack of sales concerns me. No matter how weird the stuff I do, I always thought there should have been a bigger audience out there than there has proved to be. This stuff isn't that hard. It's not like it's Moliere."
Perhaps not, but Newman's understanding of the incongruities of human nature, and his penchant for reconciling the comic with the intellectual, highlights the fact that he thinks it could be. He agrees that what he has been doing for the past 30 years is the complete opposite to the work of the denim-clad bards of the bed-sit era, whose simplicity was often rooted in a previous joint-rolling session. Newman's opinion of his chosen area is elementary, however.
"Not many people have chosen to do the same material that I have. Historical songs, for instance. The use of humour is unusual in the pop business, as are songs having a third person narrator. It's a different style, but, you know, I might be one of the best songwriters. What I write about sometimes appeals to me, at least.
"If I thought I was slipping badly and if I were beginning to decay, I'd do something else. I don't think I've been in any particular period of deterioration - but it could be. This might be a young man's sport. The majority of people do their best work in their 20s. I'm not sure there is a record of people getting better and better as they get older. The evidence points to them getting worse and worse."
While there is no such evidence on Bad Love, Newman nevertheless reckons that as a person gets older they should know more, and that what they have learnt should be reflected in what they do. He thinks he has integrity - at least where song-writing is concerned (The implications otherwise are left unsaid). He also regards Bad Love as his best record to date, saying that it's no worse than Sail Away, which many consider the essential Newman album and, in many ways, better executed.
"I had some preconceptions as to how it could turn out," he says. "I thought it could be possible that I had nothing to say and that it had been so long since I had written a regular song that wasn't for a movie I wasn't so sure that I could do it any more. I was happy that I was. Doubts? Yes, definitely. I always do, but particularly so with this one. In fact, the songs came out fairly easily."
Newman's lyrics have changed over the years. Long since held up as a paragon of the ironic, occasionally nasty songwriter who satirised and parodied bigotry and prejudice so perfectly in songs such as Rednecks, I Love LA and Short People that he was continually misunderstood, he has developed a confessional style of song-writing which (ironically!) harks back to the golden age of the singer/songwriter. The difference is that Newman's explicit autobiographical songs have more bite than Hannibal Lecter. "I didn't want to be in a box of always having to write in third person and always having to be a bad guy," he says by way of explanation.
His methods of writing his extremely personal songs are ruthlessly simple: he will use anything and anybody to create a song. "It's easier. There are no boundaries or barriers. My family and people who know me understand. They know that this is the way it is and just ignore me. Two songs on Bad Love constitute the heart of the album - My Country is pretty much the way I grew up and I Miss You is a slight exaggeration. I do miss my first wife and lover, but I'm not going to move just to be near her again. I called her and told her about the song, and that it would be coming out on an album, but for her not to worry that I'll be stalking her. She understood."
Through the supposedly fallow studio album years, Randy Newman has made a considerable name for himself writing what he terms "assignment" songs for films. From a contribution to Performance in 1970 to the imminent Toy Story 2, Newman (whose family members include acclaimed film music writers Lionel and Alfred Newman) has written for many Hollywood movies, including Ragtime, The Natural, Parenthood, Awakenings, Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Pleasantville. It comes as no surprise to hear him say that these songs aren't necessarily typical of his work.
"They were as middle-of-the-road, or as close to middle-of-the-road as I could get," he says with a genuine tinge of regret. "I didn't know how much I missed actual song-writing until I started again, and then I realised I missed it very much. I missed having a voice, quite literally, and being able to do something other than scores. Also, when you do a score it's a note and a bar at a time. It's all the considerations of writing for orchestra, and all the rules which that implies. Writing a song is more sitting down, and something happens and you just rock along with it.
"Some people might think it's easier to do because there are fewer words, but actually film work is harder. It is for me, anyway. I'd rather write a three-minute, word-based song than three minutes of music that accompanies a grasshopper chasing an ant. The parameters are different - there are snippets of music wanted here and there; you're working for a director who may want something different. With a song, it's total and complete freedom. It goes without saying that this is something I miss.
"It isn't sales or the record company or money, or the record company beating down the door. At this point of my career, most of the money comes from my work in movies. I don't like that. I wish I could earn my primary living making records. The movie work I do the best I can, but motion picture music is really subordinate to so many things."
In retrospect, he concludes that using the rock and pop medium for irony was a strange choice. "It's hard to pick irony up when you're driving in a car," he remarks. Especially, perhaps, when that car is a Lexus.
One thing is for sure, he says. "I want to make another studio album within a couple of years. It's almost like doing it for nothing, but it's what I do best. I should do more of it, and try to make up for the years when I didn't work as hard as I should have done. That's a real failing on my part. I lack self-discipline and I wasn't pushed. But hey - I'm doing fine now."
