God’s Song and Other American Prayers: The Story of Randy Newman

You could think of Randy Newman as a musical Mark Twain. 

His songs draw up from a range of curiously disconnected observations about life in this era’s America in some of the same ways that Twain’s pen spoke of the America he lived in. Twain’s Mississippi paddlewheels churned the dark waters of that rolling river mixing old and new, sacred and profane and In his songs, Newman is doing the same thing. He draws from American roots music, Tin Pan Alley, the blues, and orchestral pop. You’ll instantly recognize a Randy Newman song from his instantly hummable tunes mixed with wry humor, irony, and social commentary.  His songs are full of wry observations about slightly uncomfortable subjects.

Randy Newman knows America in all its contradictions—its kindness and cruelty, its promises and hypocrisies. His songs expose the voices we pretend not to hear, from backroom bigots to lonely losers, from crooked politicians to a God who’s tempted to give up on us. Listening to Randy is like reading between the lines of the American songbook—he doesn’t just entertain, he reveals. And maybe, by sitting with his uncomfortable truths, we can wake from our own fog, and see this country—its history, its people, its future—with clearer eyes. 

If ever there was a time when we needed clearer eyes, this is that time.

In This Episode

• Piano: You've Got a Friend in Me
• Randy Newman - Golden Gridiron Boy
• Soundtrack from The Grapes of Wrath
• Marilyn Monroe - Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend
• Soundtrack from Hello Dolly
• Three Dog Night - Mama Told Me Not to Come
• Randy Newman - Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear
• Randy Newman - I Think It's Going to Rain Today
• Randy Newman - Short People
• Randy Newman - How Great Our Lord
• Randy Newman - Shame
• Randy Newman - You Can Leave Your Hat On
• Joe Cocker - You Can Leave Your Hat On
• Randy Newman - Baltimore
• Randy Newman - God's Song
• Randy Newman - Sail Away
• Randy Newman - Political Science
• Randy Newman - Rednecks
• Randy Newman - The Girls In My Life (Part 1)
• Randy Newman - Old Kentucky Home
• Randy Newman - The Natural
• Randy Newman/ Billy Crystal/ John Goodman - If I Didn't Have You
• Randy Newman/ Sarah McLachlan - When She Loved Me
• Randy Newman -  A Few Words in Defense of Our Country
• Randy Newman - I'm Dreaming
• Randy Newman - I Love L.A.

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Transcript

Welcome back my friends. In this episode, we’re continuing our look at American character through the lens of some of our greatest singer-songwriters. This is a journey we set out on at the start of this year as an answer to some of the most perplexing questions I think we’re faced with in this first year of the new administration. 

Things are changing so rapidly – in what is, for me, a very unsettling way. I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like I’m looking out the window into American streets that don’t much resemble the neighborhood we left behind as recently as last December. Where we’re all heading, who can tell exactly. So, I’m thinking a lot this year about the America we used to be, and the American I hope we can find again if it’s not too late. 

In these next few episodes, we’re looking at American character through the lenses of some of our greatest song-writers – Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, and Jackson Browne. Each of these guys, in their own write (pun intended), have written in interesting, nuanced, highly literate ways about who we are as a people and as a nation.  They’ve spoken in their own unique ways about our strengths and our weaknesses. About our achievements and our failures.  And I hope that you’ll enjoy this journey with me.  Here we go:  

You Have a Friend in Me

Randy’s songs are a weave of all the sounds of the last one-hundred years in American music.  They have that instant sound of “home” that come from the hundreds of melodies and lyrics we’ve heard all our lives. These songs are baked through with nostalgia but a twist in every plot. They always do something that you weren’t expecting, like, if it was a trip ‘back home again’ you’d be walking in the back door – straight into the kitchen. (I’m home…!  Hello? Footsteps etc.)

Oh, it’s so GREAT to be home!  But wait… everything looks a little different than it used to. Wasn’t there a staircase just past the den?  Have I ever actually been in this place before? 

You could think of Randy Newman as a musical Mark Twain and his songs draw up from a range of curiously disconnected observations about life in this era’s America in some of the same ways that Twain’s pen spoke of the America he lived in. Twain’s Mississippi paddlewheels churned the dark waters of that rolling river mixing old and new, sacred and profane. In his songs, Newman is doing the same thing. He draws from American roots music, Tin Pan Alley, the blues, and orchestral pop. You’ll instantly recognize a Randy Newman song from his instantly hummable tunes mixed with wry humor, irony, and social commentary.  

Many of his songs have a sweeping, cinematic feel. After all, the man has also had an extensive film-scoring career – including many Pixar films, like Toy Story or Monsters Inc, or Meet the Parents, or the great baseball film, the Natural. The moods his music evokes are part of what makes these films so memorable. 

And like Twain, Newman is a formidable satirist. A lot of his songs tell stories, spun by eccentric, and totally unreliable narrators who, in their weirdness, are somehow the perfect foil to give voice to Newman’s musings on politics, human nature, and American culture. 

https://youtu.be/KAJNbZfeL8s?si=EoiZ2ujWSGQgHmAf&t=216 to 4:49

His songs are full of wry observations about slightly uncomfortable subjects.

Newman’s instinct, to write through a series of fictional narrators, comes from a place deep in his psyche. he didn’t want people to be able to say “Oh, that poor guy!”. And he wants people to listen to his songs and take them on their own merit. His family taught him not to talk about himself, not to reveal too much about himself.

Newman’s songs pull back the corners of the carpet that most people use to sweep ugly things under. In them, you meet a freakish parade of dry‑witted narrators sharing their versions of the truth’.  This is a technique that started in his dusty past: a bookish, cross‑eyed Jewish kid, who crafted stories and hid behind them instead of revealing too much of his inner-self. If people were going to notice him at all, he decided, it should be for the craft, not the confession—an instinct reinforced at home, where family etiquette frowned on personal disclosure. The result is a catalogue in which Newman exposes the world with surgical precision while keeping his own pulse artfully off the record.

He was just a little boy, but he still remembers the sights and sounds of the South – where he spent his earlies years in New Orleans, where jazz and blues came pouring out of bars, amid the humid summer nights, and the unsettling realities of segregation. “I remember the ice cream wagon with the signs marked 'colored' – which was misspelled – and 'white',” Newman recalled of those early days in New Orleans,

Though he left the South at age three, he returned each summer until he was twelve, soaking up Southern culture and its contradictions. This dual heritage – Hollywood on one side, Dixie on the other – would later inform so much of his music: the lush string arrangements and classical touches betray the Newman family legacy, while the storytelling and social consciousness draw from the heart of American experiences, North and South. Randy learned piano as a child and was writing songs in his early teens. He also studied music composition at UCLA, honing the craft he’d picked up from family.

Randy Newman’s destiny in music might have been sealed before he was even born. Growing up in LA, his musical DNA is pure Hollywood. As a musician and composer, he follows closely in the footsteps of his two famous uncles, Alfred Newman, the eldest, was the legendary head of music at 20th Century Fox, scoring classics like The Grapes of Wrath and All About Eve. Between Alfred and his brother, Lionel, Randy’s uncles collected a total of 10 Academy Awards. Other massive films of the times that include the Alfred’s work are The Song of Bernadette (1943) and the Captain from Castile (1947). 

Lionel’s compositions were brassier, jazzier. Here’s what he did for the film, Hello Dolly. that featured Barbara Streisand, Gene Kelly and Louis Armstrong. He also scored the soundtrack for Marilyn Monroe’s film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Marilyn actually sang this herself. 

Mama Told Me Not to Come (TDN)

By his late teens, he was already a professional songwriter – cranking out tunes for others in the booming Los Angeles pop scene of the 1960s. If you had met the young Randy Newman in, say, 1965, you might have mistaken him for a typical Brill Building-style songsmith in the mold of, say, Carol King or Jerry Goffin: a quiet, bespectacled guy at a piano, turning out love songs for other voices. In fact, Newman did pen hits for others. The band Three Dog Night took his “Mama Told Me Not to Come” to #1 in 1970 and artists like Judy Collins and Harry Nilsson also covered his work. He was making a respectable living as a behind-the-scenes songwriter. Yet something restless in Randy refused to be satisfied writing conventional pop. He had a different kind of voice inside him – one that didn’t quite fit the clean romance or carefree pop that others wanted. In his twenties, as the 1960s turned turbulent, Randy Newman felt drawn to explore darker, riskier subjects in his writing. He once pinpointed the exact moment this shift happened. He was trying to write a straightforward song – reportedly a cheerful number for Frank Sinatra Jr. – when inspiration took a left turn. “I just all of a sudden couldn’t do it,” Newman said. 

He wrote his first off-center character song – “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear”– in 1965 and he never looked back. 

The song was whimsical and odd, a story-song about an unlikely duo waltzing into high society. “There I was,” Newman recalled, “and I just sort of followed it on. Then I was never the same. I never wrote particularly conventional songs after that”

Newman’s first albums at the end of the ’60s and start of the ’70s didn’t sell much – his 1968 debut Randy Newman mostly puzzled listeners, despite critical praise. But those records revealed a songwriter with classical chops and a sharp pen. Here was a young man who could orchestrate like a Hollywood composer, yet write lyrics with the irony of a Mark Twain short story. He didn’t sound like anyone else. While the radio was full of flower-power anthems and love ballads, Randy Newman was writing ragtime-influenced tunes about lonely misfits and satire-drenched ruminations on society. He was an outsider in the age of hippie rock – a bespectacled satirist armed with piano and orchestra. 

(Music: A snippet of Newman's orchestral “Cowboy” theme or another early orchestral piece, under voice.) 

But on the point of Randy’s use of irony, it’s a technique that allows him to use his great gift for satire powerfully; sometimes with slack-jawed effect. So much so, actually, that his audience sometimes be confused about what he really think about any of the uncomfortable topics in a lot of his songs – which are, more often than not, like puzzles to be solved.

Once again, Robert Hilburn comes into the picture. He wrote a book about Randy and afterwards did an interview about it with Variety Magazine. Here’s what he said about Newman;

 “Randy’s best friend Lenny said he’s the most loyal, decent kind of person, and I never saw any evidence that that’s not true. There’s a lot of generosity and decency in Randy. I think he tries to see the best in somebody, actually. I think he’s an optimist at heart, and he loves the country. I think it’s important to know that he’s not a nasty, savage kind of person. There’s a decency to write these songs, and he’s not just bitter and all that kind of stuff. There’s shock that the country has become what it’s become.”  

It’s worth noting that Newman’s work is not all satire and cynicism. He has another side – a tender, melancholy streak that surfaces in some truly haunting songs. His early ballad “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” is one of the most heartbreaking songs of the 1960s, a mournful meditation on human indifference and the longing for compassion. “Broken windows and empty hallways, pale dead moon in a sky streaked with gray,” he sings in a weary, gentle voice, “human kindness is overflowing, and I think it’s going to rain today.” The irony is subtle and deeply sad – “human kindness is overflowing” is the kind of platitude we wish were true, but in this context Newman makes it sound like a cruel joke. That song, devoid of any comic persona, reveals the bruised heart behind Newman’s satirical mask. For all his reputation as a cynic, Randy Newman cares deeply about people – their struggles, their foolishness, their vulnerability. “You see what people do to one another… it’s like a failure of evolution,” he once said, talking about why he can’t help but be a little cynical. Jealousy, war, cruelty – humans never seem to learn. “No, there’s nothing to be cynical about,” he added with biting irony. But then he softened: “I’ve never been a big animal lover, but I am a fan of people. They try so hard, you know. They’re so cute.”

That mix of dark pessimism and fond appreciation captures Randy Newman’s outlook. He’ll tear strips off humanity for its sins, but at the end of the day, he’s on humanity’s side. His music, even at its most caustic, comes from a place of wanting us to do better.

Keep that in mind as we talk about some of these songs.

(Music shifts – the jaunty intro of “Short People” plays under narration.) 

Imagine the scene: a packed auditorium in 1978. Randy Newman sits at a piano on stage, peering out through the spotlight. He’s playing the jaunty intro of “Short People,” and laughter ripples through the crowd – but not everyone is laughing. In the back, a group of protesters holds signs, arms crossed. Newman continues, half-smiling, fully aware of the tension. By the time he croons the chorus – “Short people got no reason to live” – some in the audience are stone-faced. They’re not sure if they should laugh or be appalled. This uncomfortable mix of amusement and offense is exactly what Randy Newman often evoked. He walks a fine line between satire and sincerity, between humor and horror. And in that uneasy balance, he forces us to think. For Newman, songs are mirrors that show us the ugly absurdities of our culture, our prejudices, our hypocrisies. If that reflection makes us squirm, all right then…. Randy Newman has spent decades holding that mirror up with a crooked grin on his face.

In a 1998 interview with Newman, NPR’s Terrey Gross asked Randy, “How many other singers would be willing to sing songs in the persona of a racist, or someone very insecure, the way a lot of characters in your songs are?” 

His response? 

“True. …It’s very unusual… to take on a persona that’s less than heroic or admirable. But I’d started doing it in ’65…‘Simon Smith’ was the first song I wrote that was a little off center.” 

In his unique approach to writing, Randy Newman has had the freedom to explore themes most songwriters wouldn’t dare touch. One early reviewer catalogued Newman’s favorite themes: the generation gap (in his songs, he tends to find fault on both sides), God and religion (Newman’s God is often sarcastic or uncaring) <song example here>, male-female relationships (he often writes from the male perspective – usually that of a loser or a weirdo, he admits) <song example here>, racism (he’s vehemently against it, yet his songs show an unsettling understanding of its twisted appeal) <song example here>, and alienation (indeed, many Newman protagonists are outsiders looking in) <song example here>

In short, Newman shines a light on the ugly, hypocritical, or absurd corners of American life – and he often does it by becoming the very voice of the ugliness, if only to expose it. This approach is not without pitfalls. When you write a song in first-person from the perspective of, say, a bigot or a fool, there’s always the risk that people won’t understand you’re being ironic. Randy Newman learned this the hard way more than once.

Sail Away

His third album, Sail Away (1972), drove the point home. The title track “Sail Away” welcomes the listener with a gentle, beautiful melody and a tender string arrangement. Newman sings in a sweet, reassuring lilt. Only gradually do you realize the horrific irony: the song’s narrator is a slave trader, pitching the idea of America as paradise to lure African villagers onto his ship. “In America, you’ll get food to eat… no one laughing at you,” he coos, promising these desperate souls comfort and freedom if they just “sail away” with him. It’s a gut punch encased in a lullaby – the kind of brilliant, unsettling satire that would become Randy Newman’s hallmark.  Beautiful on the surface, deadly serious underneath.

The Unreliable Narrator: Voices of America’s Grotesques

Ventriloquist

Randy Newman’s songwriting voice is unique – partly because it often isn’t his voice at all. It’s an actor’s voice, a ventriloquist’s dummy, a character he inhabits for the duration of a song. In an era when singer-songwriters were spilling their confessional guts in first-person love songs, Newman did something different: he created characters and let them speak, no matter how unsavory or pitiable they were. As one critic noted, Newman essentially introduced the unreliable narrator to pop songwriting.  In his songs, he speaks through what he once called “recognizable American grotesques” – caricatures of our culture’s ignorance, arrogance, and insecurities – and by doing so, he reveals truths rather than simply confessing personal feelings. Consider some of the people we meet in Randy Newman’s musical world: there are dancing bears and racist rednecks, junkies in love, boastful Good Old Boys, crooked politicians, indifferent tycoons, insecure man-children, religious zealots, and cynical everymen.

Often these narrators are not the kind of people society admires – in fact, they’re frequently the opposite. Newman has sung from the perspective of bigots and con men, losers and lonely souls. It’s a daring artistic choice. “It’s very unusual to take on a persona that’s less than heroic or admirable,” Newman told NPR’s Terry Gross. 

This song, Political Science, from his album, Sail Away is exhibit number one. Written during the Nixon administration, Randy’s painting a picture of the world where America solves all its problems by simply eliminating anyone who disagrees.  The characters in this song would probably feel right at home in Trump’s White House!

He sings about dropping the "big one" – the atomic bomb – and how everyone will love us then.  

The music itself – without the lyrics – is sonic sarcasm. It makes the message even more unsettling.  Released in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War, the song clearly reflects the anti-war sentiment of the time. Sarcasm and satire flow thickly in this song and Newman is going way past just protesting the way. He also attacks the underlying assumptions that led to it in the first place:  Exhibit A - the belief in American dominance. Figure 1 -  the justification of interventionism, special footnote: your typical American’s simplistic, even naive view of global politics.  Sad, isn’t it? How in over 50 years, things haven’t changed for the better yet? 

Newman isn't just saying "war is bad." He's dissecting the mindset that makes war possible.  He's holding a mirror up to American foreign policy and showing its potential for brutality and arrogance. 

Compared with Bruce Cockburn, who we looked at in the last episode, Randy is using dark humor to drive his message home. Cockburn writes poetry that makes you feel the pain. He’s very empathetic. Newman’s approach is to get you feeling all relaxed and comfortable before he hits you with his zingers. He’s like the Trojan Horse with lyrics like:

"They're rioting in Africa / They're starving over there / They can't buy Cadillacs / Like we do over here”

Having popped you with his right, he then drives in a left upper cut to your funny bone – which he hopes is positioned close to your brain when he proposes his solution to the political problem. “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens” he sings. We’ll teach them to withhold their gratitude from us, by golly! It reminds me of Trump and Vance schooling Zalensky back in February about ‘showing more appreciation’ to America…. As if he hadn’t already been doing that for years.  

"Boom goes London and boom Paree ... / We'll set everybody free."  In Randy’s satire, only Australia is spared – but Australia’s cool, because they’ve got kangaroos … and good surfing!  

Sail Away

Back to Randy. His song, Sail Away, is a conversation between an American in colonial America hoping to attract a foreigner to our fair shores. There’s no hunger in America – there’s watermelon and pancakes for everybody! No man-eating lions or tigers, no snakes either. All there is to do is “sing about Jesus and drink wine all day!” It’s great to be an American! 

And then … Newman puts a clue in the song about his real intent…. He sings, “Come aboard little wog!” I had to look that word up in the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s an old one, not used much anymore. It means ‘a non-white’ person and the point of the word was to offend. Add the word ‘little’ to it, and it’d have sounded like ‘boy’. 

And then there’s this invitation to sail away to Charleston Bay – the port of entry for nearly half of the African slave trade. So,  this song is an invitation to America - to come be a slave.

In this Make America Great Again era, a lot of us are scratching our heads and questioning the math. Especially when the things that are being done aren’t so great. Not really. Not if you believe in diversity, or science, honoring the Constitution and checks and balances. The history books are always written by the victors, it’s true. But it’s also true that – historical case in point – there was never one single Native American treaty in the hundreds of years of promises made by ‘the great white father’ in Washington where our leaders kept their word. And this isn’t something in our past, either. 

In 2016, when I went on a week-long mission trip with my church to the Navajo Reservation, the people who live there told us they were fighting the US government to keep nuclear waste off of tribal land. A few weeks before we went there, one of their teens had been killed by a non-native cop, shot in the back several times.  The crime? Stealing a case of beer. 

We haven’t progressed as much as we think we have since the days of Charleston Bay.

Rednecks

https://youtu.be/KAJNbZfeL8s?si=Hw1HJ1hgZFX3Nhrf&t=1475

Newman has more than once put pen to paper, writing out the lyrics to songs about bigotry. In 1974, he released an album called Good Old Boys.  This song, Rednecks, is the opening track. It reminds me of a sales meeting I once attended back in the days when I was working in the food industry. I was visiting a group of our sales managers in Memphis, when, in the midst of the meeting, this Cajun dude suddenly pulled out his wallet, and a card in it, which he flashed around the room for the rest of us to see. Proudly, he announced his membership in the John Birch Society, because he was getting ready for the (beep) wars.  It took me a few minutes to get over the shock off, and pick my jaw off of the floor. That’s the kind of guy Newman is talking about in this song. Some of the lyrics go, 

“We got no necked oilmen from Texas/And good ol' boys from Tennessee

And college men from LSU/ Went in dumb, come out dumb too

Hustlin' 'round Atlanta in their alligator shoes/ Gettin' drunk every weekend at the barbecues

And they're keepin' the n*****s down”

Did you see how right after that line the music goes into the catchiest, jingliest piano you ever heard? This is musical sarcasm. And who thought pianos could be sarcastic?  The  contrast between that last lyric and what follows is so jarring! 

(Crippled Inside) There was a moment there, before 2016, when it almost seemed like America had finally gotten over its 350 year-old racist flu. During that momentary flash of racial amnesia, when we forgot we’re actually still Crippled Inside (like John Lennon would have put it) people might have felt that racism was possibly still a thing in the South, but certainly not in the North. This bit is the soft underbelly where Newman decides to jab his pen-knife. 

“Rednecks” opens Newman’s 1974 album Good Old Boys. It’s written in the voice of a Southern white man – a redneck from Georgia – reacting with fury to how Northerners mock and look down on Southerners. In the song’s first verse, this narrator watches a Northern TV comedian joking about Southern racism. The redneck is offended not because the joke is untrue, but because he feels hypocrisy in it: those Yankees pretend to be so enlightened, yet they’re just laughing at us. So our Georgia narrator lets loose a torrent of resentment. He proudly calls himself a “redneck” and pointedly uses a racial slur – the notorious n-word – repeatedly, to spite the Northerners.

He says, 

“Now your Northern n*****’s a negro/You see he's got his dignity

Down here we're too ignorant to realize/That the North has set the n***** free

Yes he's free to be put in a cage/In Harlem in New York City

 And he's free to be put in a cage/On the South Side of Chicago, and the West Side…

..And he's free to be put in a cage/In Roxbury in Boston

 They're gatherin' 'em up from miles around/Keepin' the n*****s down

And here’s the whole brilliant logic of the song: In the beginning, Newman gets us feeling pretty good about ourselves. We’re not like those ignorant, racist Southerners. We’re better than that. We’re not from there. We’re different. The narrator is obviously one of ‘them’ – not ‘us’. But then, because it’s the redneck narrator pointing out the ugly truth - the truth hits HARD.  It’s the Trojan Horse again!  

Nobody escapes Newman’s scorn in this song: not the Southern bigot, not the smug Northern liberals. “We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks, and we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground,” the chorus jeers – a stupid anthem for a stupid attitude, both embracing and mocking the stereotype. It’s brilliant satire – but imagine being Randy Newman and performing “Rednecks” live in 1974. He’s not a Southern good ol’ boy at all, but a short, curly-haired Jewish guy from Los Angeles. 

Many would flinch just waiting for the fallout. Newman later admitted, “I used to be nervous about playing ‘Rednecks’ in front of black audiences. I still am, a little,” he said. “If I use [that] terrible word in a song and people don’t understand why I’m using it, it worries me. I don’t do it for fun… I don’t do it without trepidation. But I have to do what I have to do. I wouldn’t change the way I write for anything.”

Those words bear repeating: I have to do what I have to do. That’s the artistic conviction behind Newman’s satire. He doesn’t use shock language casually or for cheap effect – he uses it when it’s the only way to inhabit a character truthfully, to lay a societal hypocrisy bare. And he knows it’s risky. When “Rednecks” came out, some listeners – hearing that ugly slur in the chorus – surely thought Randy Newman himself might be racist. In reality, of course, the song is a searing indictment of racism. But Newman had to gamble that his audience would understand the context and intent. Many did – but some, inevitably, did not.

Like Randy said in one of his interviews, “People don't like to hear the truth. Actually, the truth is people don't like to work for their entertainment.” He was actually talking about the overall response to his song, “Short People” – a song that I personally think you’d have to be pretty dense to not get the sarcasm and irony that informs every note of the song.  And still, when it came out in the late ‘70’s, Newman – finding himself with an actual hit on his hands for a change – also found he’d become – once again -  the object of controversy. The song’s exaggeratedly cruel jabs at diminutive folks (“short people got no reason to live,” he sneers) were meant as a joke – a satire of irrational prejudice. A lot of people just didn’t get the joke. I suppose – in these VERY ‘socially correct’ times, we’d probably be right back there again! Even as the song made its way to #2 on the charts, he started receiving hate mail and even death threats. Concerts drew picketers – incensed actual short people and their allies! There’s a famous quote often attributed to Mark Twain: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Randy Newman’s songs tell uncomfortable truths, and because he often tells them through the lies of his characters, he ends up remembered for the truths nonetheless.

Through all this, Randy Newman has maintained a remarkably matter-of-fact attitude. He doesn’t enjoy controversy, but he doesn’t run from it either. In one interview, he reflected on the “Short People” backlash with a mix of regret and defiance. “I had no idea that anyone could believe that someone was as crazy as that character,” he said, marveling that people actually thought he harbored “animus against short people” in earnest. He chuckled at the absurdity – writing a whole song spewing hatred for the vertically challenged, with a full philosophical rationale to boot – who could think it was sincere? And yet, he acknowledged, some people took a genuine beating because of the song.

Schoolyard bullies and office jokesters seized on the hit to taunt short folks. “Who wants to be bothered  ‘Here’s your song again, honey, ha ha’?” Newman said empathetically, imagining the torment of a kid getting mocked each time the song played. “It doesn’t do any good if someone is going into an office every day and gets ribbed about being short… or ‘Mom, I don’t want to go to school today – this damn song,’ you know?”

Hearing the real hurt that “Short People” caused some individuals gave Newman pause. “I almost regret nothing that I’ve written, and I don’t regret that [song] because I like it,” he admitted, “but you could make a case for that one.”

It’s a strikingly honest reflection: he stands by the art, but he’s not blind to its collateral damage. Newman ultimately didn’t disown “Short People” – he still performs it and often prefaces it with a dry disclaimer that it’s about prejudice, not actually about shortness. And he even jokes that the outraged reaction only proved his point. “I was right about the little suckers. They proved it,” he said with a dark laugh years later. “There were midgets picketing my shows… I had a death threat. People sure got mad. People don’t like to hear the truth.”

In that biting remark – half jest, half lament – you hear Newman’s stubborn pride. Yes, the song upset people, but maybe it upset them because it hit a nerve about the irrational nature of prejudice. As he added, “Actually, the truth is that people don’t like to work for their entertainment.”

Meanwhile, the real racists, the ‘blood and soil’ crowd who think that pillow-cases are a fashion statement, and parade through towns chanting crap like ‘jews will not replace us’ actually DID see the point Randy was making, and they didn’t like it either. 

Randy’s characters are usually a little less than attractive. But they are, unfortunately, real. He feels the same way about his fans. 

 to 1:35

And if we’re not the world’s most attractive fan group, at least there’s not too many of us! He estimates there might be, worldwide, around 200,000.

Randy’s a diligent student of America, and Americana.  You get a sense of who we are, us plain, ordinary, kind of homely Americans, when you listen to his song, My Old Kentucky Home. He’s hung the song on the scaffolding of a 19th century Stephen Foster song by the same name. 

This is no tribute to Kentucky, either. Like in other places, it’s dark, and funny, and it makes us recognize some uncomfortable things about racism, class, and Southern identity.  It’s a song about an American bully who’s having a hard time getting by in a bullying America. 

We get some descriptions about shooting birds off a telephone wire, and he makes it socially awkward to romanticize Southern nostalgia. The characters in the song, like Sister Sue and Brother Gene, kind of remind us of Billy Carter, Jimmy’s embarrassing brother who raised a lot of eyebrows during his presidency. Billy worked hard to earn his image of a fun-loving, beer-drinking Southerner, who had a way of putting his foot in his mouth, often. Like the times he insulted Carter’s cabinet members, calling one "the dumbest bastard I ever met in my life" and another an "asshole”. Savvy in leveraging his connection to Jimmy, he opened a gas station in the Carter family’s hometown, Plains, Georgia. He even launched a beer business called "Billy Beer."  Perfect, for a guy who was openly alcoholic. 

We’re a country of big-talkers, too. We like to puff out our chests and strut around like we’re important or something. Maybe its because we’re always trying to compete with people we think have something over us. Sort of like referring to the Canadian Prime Minister as America’s 51st governor. Because we’re not as convinced about our own greatness as we want other people to be. Randy’s song, “The Girls In My Life part 1” is about a guy like Mr. Cassanova who’s never been on a date. 

https://youtu.be/RAwjRjJxAEY?si=bfQRNGeTKOzJN3S0 The Girls In My Life pt 1

https://youtu.be/_KX73Cwx61U?si=WdTKYy4MLjnPwb8v&t=704 to 13:18

Short People

https://youtu.be/cS06eprlj2I?si=zZZvMZYB4b1iNd6_ It’s Money That Matters

He’s also turned his attention to America’s never-ending pursuit of wealth. This song, It’s Money That Matters, is one of those songs. 

He pokes fun at how people compromise their morals, exploit others, and even engage in destructive behavior to get wealthy.

He reminds us,  not that in the time of MAGA we NEED a reminder, that the system is rigged in favor of those who already have money, making it even harder for others to climb the economic ladder.  

The characters in the song, even the wealthy ones, don't seem particularly happy or fulfilled.

He’s telling us that the relentless pursuit of wealth doesn’t guarantee happiness, sometimes it’s actually the road to emptiness and dissatisfaction.  

Newman suggests that money influences policy decisions, shapes public opinion, and even distorts our understanding of what's important. Using Bruce Cockburn’s great songs as a spring-board, I hit on these topics pretty hard in the last episode, Truth to Power. Go back and check it out if you’ve missed it.

And another of Randy’s oddball characters:

“Then I talked to a man lived up on the county line

I was washing his car with a friend of mine

He was a little fat guy in a red jumpsuit

I said "You look kind of funny"

He said "I know that I do"

"But I got a great big house on the hill here

And a great big blonde wife inside it

And a great big pool in my backyard and another great big pool beside it

Sonny it's money that matters, hear what I say

It's money that matters in the USA”

Songs like these, poking at the stupidity of chasing the dollar, aren’t going to impress everyone.. That doesn’t stop Newman from writing them though.

https://youtu.be/TeC5-5idyzY?si=o6KfS0Y7q8CoStE8 Its Lonely At the Top

https://youtu.be/bV0T7lexE9A?si=JUYfLTDNf-HezxdQ&t=1331  Meeting with Sinatra.

(Sound effect: Projector clicking, a flourish of orchestral film music) NARRATOR: By the 1980s, while Randy Newman continued to release critically acclaimed albums, he also found himself drawn into the family business: writing music for films. In a sense, he had been headed that way all along. Remember, he literally grew up watching his Uncle Alfred conduct 20th Century Fox scoring sessions. Newman’s own compositional style always had a cinematic flair – many of his pop songs feature sweeping string arrangements or nods to classical music. It was natural that Hollywood would come calling. His first major film score assignment was Ragtime (1981), a period drama that allowed Newman to indulge in lush, old-fashioned orchestration. He earned an Academy Award nomination for that score, and more film projects followed: The Natural (1984), Pleasantville (1998), and quite famously, an ongoing partnership with Pixar Animation Studios on films like Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and Cars (2006). Over the years, Randy Newman became almost as well known for his movie work as for his own albums. In fact, to a whole generation of children, he’s “the guy who sings the Toy Story song.” “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the theme from Toy Story, is possibly Newman’s most universally recognized composition – a sweet, jaunty ode to friendship that has nothing sarcastic or unsettling about it at all. This dual identity – Randy Newman the sly social satirist vs. Randy Newman the beloved Disney songwriter – is a fascinating contrast. Newman is acutely aware of it. “Everyone in the music business knows how good this guy is,” one theater director noted, “but to the general public, he’s the guy who goes on the Oscars and sings the song from Toy Story.”

Indeed, Newman has performed at the Academy Awards numerous times, often singing his wholesome, family-friendly film tunes to a global TV audience. It’s a long way from singing “Rednecks” in a smoky club. How does Newman himself reconcile these two careers? With characteristic candor and humor. He clearly loves working with orchestras and writing film music – it connects him to that part of his heritage and training. “I really kind of like writing music for movies,” he told one interviewer. “I love working with the orchestra. I love the sound an orchestra makes… I feel very comfortable doing it.”

In scoring sessions, Newman is in his element, joking with the violinists, tweaking the trombone parts, chasing the perfect chord to underscore a scene. It’s craft, and he enjoys the craft. But he’s also frank that film scoring is work-for-hire, not personal expression. “Every Disney movie I’ve done, I could have written the same song for: ‘If we all pull together, things will work out,’” Newman quipped, summing up the generic moral of so many animated films

. He understands that when he’s composing for Pixar or Disney, he’s a hired hand, serving someone else’s story. There’s a certain formula and optimism expected, and he delivers it – often with a wink, but earnestly enough to serve the film. “They are coming to me for knock-down, knock-about comedy,” Newman once said of the Hollywood producers who hire him, acknowledging that much of his film work has been scoring broad family comedies

. “The Pixar ones are different because there’s more depth to them – they’re sad, they’re happy, they’re everything. But [on some others] had it not been Pixar, I wouldn’t have done it.”

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 He has turned down film jobs that didn’t appeal to him, but overall he’s had a very successful second career in this realm. Crucially, Newman compartmentalizes his film scoring from his songwriting. He once noted that writing songs for himself is much harder – “a good deal easier than writing,” he joked about performing live – whereas writing songs for movies, especially for animated characters, can be almost like filling in the blanks. That doesn’t mean he phones it in; he’s won two Oscars (finally, after fifteen nominations!) and poured genuine heart into some of those movie songs. (“When She Loved Me,”* from Toy Story 2, sung by Sarah McLachlan, is as tear-jerking as anything he’s ever written.) But Newman recognizes that those songs aren’t “Randy Newman” speaking – they’re Toy Story’s cowboy doll, or Monsters, Inc.’s friendly monsters, or a singing car, etc., speaking. It’s storytelling in service of someone else’s narrative, not his own soul being laid bare. So in a funny way, even in Hollywood Randy Newman continued doing what he’d done in his personal songs: writing in character. The difference is the characters in Pixar films are lovable and straightforward, whereas the characters in Randy’s own albums are thorny and ambivalent. But either way, he’s ventriloquizing, writing for a persona. Perhaps this is why he could move between the two worlds so fluidly. Newman himself has joked about the simplicity of the themes he’s asked to write for family films. “If we all pull together, things will work out” – that’s how he summarized the message behind every Disney song he’s done

. He delivers those upbeat messages with a wink and a sturdy melody, but they don’t necessarily reflect his personal worldview. In fact, one suspects he finds those platitudes a bit too neat. In his own songwriting, happy endings are rare and things don’t automatically work out just because we hold hands and sing. By the 1990s and 2000s, while Newman was racking up film credits, he released fewer solo albums. But when he did, he hadn’t lost his edge. In 2008, he put out a song called “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” a tongue-in-cheek commentary on American leadership and decline, name-dropping empires of old. And in 2017, during a fraught moment in America’s political climate, Newman — then in his mid-70s — wrote a scathing satirical song titled “I’m Dreaming.” In it, he inhabits the voice of an American who longs for the past – specifically, for a white president. “I’m dreaming of a white President,” the narrator croons, “Just like the ones we’ve always had.” The song (released as a free download) never mentions any current politician by name, but its target was obvious

. In true Newman form, it outraged some and electrified others. After all those years, Randy Newman was still willing to risk offense to call out what he saw as hypocrisy and ugliness in American life – in this case, the resurgence of open racism and nostalgia for an unjust status quo. He doesn’t put it gently, either; the song’s narrator rattles off a litany of bigoted asides. It’s uncomfortable to hear. It’s meant to be.

Randy Newman was inducted into the RRHOF in 2013 by another great American song writer, Don Henley.