You’ve Got to Let This Razor Blade into Your Life

Tim Riley reviews Robert Hilburn’s “A Few Words In Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman.”

By Tim RileyOctober 22, 2024

• Music

• Biography & Autobiography

• Nonfiction

POP SONGWRITING SWIMS in clichés, most of which wash over us unredeemed. Some songwriters use them as pivots, or hooks, to nail down abstract emotions (“You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling,” sings Chappell Roan). Others punch them up, twist them into thought puzzles (“You’re a mess, but you’re my mess,” claims Taylor Swift). To rock’s master satirist Randy Newman, platitudes hold gunpowder. A typical Newman irony lashes a dark thought to a picturesque melody—the bite grows bitter when tuneful (“We’re rednecks—we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground”). Many of his best songs slide across a recurring subtext: all the things we assume to be true, he suggests, rest on flimsy, subjective “realities.” It’s scary to think what Newman might have sold us had he gone into advertising.

Ever since he wrote and sang “Sail Away” in 1972, a seductive melody sung by a slave-trader holding out promise to human chattel, Newman has figured as a major voice; for most critics, he ranks alongside Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen. The previous year, “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones had such a malicious slave-ship groove that it slipped by almost without notice; “Sail Away” heaved with supernatural cant, and you misheard it at your peril. Its beauty was lashed to its offensiveness. Newman finally earned a giant cosmic giggle for “Short People,” his first hit in 1978, which earned sing-alongs to the hook “Don’t want no short people ’round here.” Steve Martin even did a bit where he “got really small …” That joyous refrain overstated the prejudice to inflate the cartoon racism. Some still missed it, which made it all the more enjoyable. This was a time when satire and irony found plenty of ears in the mainstream audience. Nobody’s suing the Republican nominee for using that song as a rally fanfare in 2024.

In Robert Hilburn’s attentive A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman (2024), the “Short People” episode gains punch through its larger context, which takes Newman’s story from a broken home and unheralded genius on through to his popular Pixar soundtracks and late-period masterpieces like “Putin” (2016). In this larger—not to say epic—frame, Newman carries forward his career as if he had already imagined how a writer, solo performer, and then film composer might mold his ambitions to mock any idea of a “normal” career. At each phase, Hilburn quotes Newman alongside the many musicians and directors who collaborated with him, as well as childhood friend/producer Lenny Waronker. The book paints a respectable if guarded portrait of a complicated and self-contradictory figure who knots clichés for spite.

Newman’s most famous song, of course, comes from Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” which doesn’t have much of a subtext. It’s one of those written-to-script jobs that somehow straddles the Grand Canyon between Newman’s humane cynicism and Hollywood’s pompous sentimentality. If it sounds obvious, too on the nose, count that as part of its craft: hearing Newman sing it, you almost expect a trapdoor, and the trick of the song becomes its wholeheartedness. It’s a greeting card that would sound impossibly banal coming from almost anybody else. When it comes on, it makes you think of Woody and Buzz and the wisdom of their story arcs. It’s a measure of Newman’s talent that a number like “Friend” deepens, rather than confuses or contradicts, his larger project. Consider: Newman’s best-known song was never even released as a single.

Newman grew up in Los Angeles and New Orleans. His childhood friend, Lenny Waronker, had a father, Simon, who played classical violin for the 20th Century Fox Orchestra. Simon Waronker started Liberty Records in 1955. Liberty turned out hits by Eddie Cochran, Jan and Dean, and Julie London. Simon worked with Lionel Newman, Randy’s film composer uncle. Lenny Waronker did summer stints at Liberty between semesters at USC, and he and Randy Newman visited recording sessions and traded lore. Hilburn describes this early phase as remarkably productive and acute, as if Newman pressed hard against the idea that his Oscar-decorated uncles Lionel and Alfred owned the family brand. The family connection only makes this climb more intriguing, seeing as Newman both bested and created a completely alternative solo artist persona.

While attending UCLA, Newman studied orchestration and composition with an Italian musician named Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, whose other students included the decorated film composer John Williams. Trained ears can still hear a lot of Tin Pan Alley history in Newman’s voice, and a formal yet offhand approach to voice-leading and spicy intervals in both his piano and orchestral arrangements.

Next to Fats Domino, Newman adored the Brill Building crew:

Randy’s favorite [songwriter] was Carole King, whose strength, like his at the time, was composition; her then-husband, Gerry Goffin, was the lyricist. “I thought she was the tops,” Randy said, citing “Down Home,” “It Might as Well Rain until December” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” as some of his favorite Goffin-King tunes. “One thing she had that I also had to some extent was that she knew classic Gershwin and Rodgers tunes and she would use those … harmonic changes.”

Pretty soon, Waronker worked his way into production, helming the Harpers Bizarre cover of Paul Simon’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” arranged by Leon Russell for a 1967 Top 40 hit. That album closed with Newman’s “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear.” This led Newman to his first solo recording contract, in 1968.

But Newman had been busy backstage. He wrote “Love Is Blind” for Aretha Franklin’s sister Erma in 1963, and “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” for Jerry Butler, both soul staples. With future country singer Jeannie Sealy, he wrote a number that Irma Thomas picked up, “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” (1964) which came out with the B-side “Time Is on My Side.” “Anyone” had enough pent-up desire (and nostalgic ache) to anchor the 2011 Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” (and to return more subtly throughout later episodes), in which Jessica Brown Findlay’s character sings the song as a talent show contestant. She wins release from her video-screen existence at a heavy cost, and the script feeds on the track’s retro foreboding.

Even during this early phase, Newman boasted seasoned writing chops. By 1966, he came up with a defining gesture, “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” built on a cliché of defeated, halting irony. Within its skeletal frame, the song’s gentle melody fences with a depressive lyric about betrayal (“Tin can at my feet / Think I’ll kick it down the street / That’s the way to treat a friend”). The gorgeous leap for the singer comes on the line “Human kindness is overflowing,” the coffin’s final nail. The first recording, by Julius La Rosa, soon vanished, but insiders took notice just as quickly; with over 100 renditions to choose from, including those by former Animals singer Eric Burdon, Judy Collins, Barbra Streisand, and Peggy Lee, start with Dusty Springfield or Joe Cocker. It’s almost impossible to do wrong by “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” although the number’s invisible ballast can booby-trap the singer. Ricky Nelson’s soft-rock take from 1968 arches hard towards “almost.” Hilburn doesn’t spend much time on this number, even though it anchors Newman’s early period and created a lifetime’s worth of royalties. Gliding over this moment feels like one of Hilburn’s oversights. When Newman closed his first solo record with this “Rain” as the penultimate track, it made singers’ ears itch.

Newman had enough self-awareness to know how fate had placed him in many of the right rooms. An early meeting with legendary “Hound Dog” songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller gave him goosebumps:

“Jerry was such a star that Randy and I went to his office with a lot of trepidation and fear,” Waronker said of the trip. “But Jerry was unbelievably nice and asked Randy to play some songs, one of which Jerry liked a lot. I think it was ‘Friday Night,’ which sounded like something Jerry and Mike [Stoller] had done with the Drifters. It was later recorded by the O’Jays. Just before we left, Jerry told Randy, ‘These are good.’ Randy was so thrilled. In the elevator, he kept saying, ‘This is like something from a Judy Garland or Mickey Rooney movie.’”

Hilburn describes Leiber and Stoller consulting with Peggy Lee about their 1969 showpiece “Is That All There Is?,” a kind of undersong to “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.” Lee loved Newman’s “Rain,” and she refused to do the Leiber-Stoller session unless Newman arranged their number.

Newman frames the layered story in “Is That All There Is?” by teasing out the song’s most complicated elements: a top-shelf singer like Lee speaking the verses with an aloof resolve, singing only on the refrain, which turns the mood frail, almost wayward; a banjo taking the foreground against a country-fair brass band; and the final verse landing on a matter-of-fact suicide note, where Lee brushes off death as the ultimate huckster: “I’m not ready for that final disappointment.” If anybody doubts Lee’s intelligence after hiring Newman, they lack all credibility.

Because of Hilburn’s extraordinary access, including unpublished material from Newman’s archivist Gary Norris, this biography contains glimpses of Newman’s mostly private life, including quotes from his five children and extended showbiz family. (A note he writes to his father reads: “Dear Dad, Remember me when I’m dead. Your pal, Randy.”) Hilburn also gets unparalleled permission to quote Newman’s lyrics at length, which conveys a stronger sense of their candor: left alone on the page, Newman’s words feel like bones.

Unlike Newman’s unreliable song narrators, Hilburn plays his all-access status safe. No rival voices call out any weaknesses, no other songwriters puzzle over Newman’s intricacies. But sometimes a rare glimmer of hubris shoots through: “I resent Paul Simon’s belief in himself as a poet,” Newman says. “I resent his pretension. I don’t like people who never come out of the meadow. Or never make a sound louder than ‘Ah.’” In other places, Newman sounds far kinder to his New York rival.

Hilburn excels when he traces, at first, how a Newman song like “Louisiana 1927,” from Good Old Boys (1974), revisits history, and then the biographer follows that by projecting Hurricane Katrina’s fallout in 2005, when rescuers lifted Fats Domino from the third floor of his Ninth Ward house by helicopter, and 25,000 neighbors camped out at the Superdome. Here, Hilburn renews the wisdom in Newman’s song and finishes with a detailed description of his local-hero performances of the number at the Jazz & Heritage Festival. And the book gets larded with insider details: Newman played in bands with Taj Mahal, and on Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk sessions (1966), all of which enlarges his persona with humble, uncredited session work. Newman could easily arrange many of his songs as instrumentals and attract admiration.

Hilburn highlights many forgotten soundtracks that make Newman look like a workaholic, beginning with 1981’s Ragtime (dubbed “underrated”), and on through The Natural (1984), Awakenings (1990), Pleasantville (1998), and Marriage Story (2019). Soundtrack specialist Jon Burlingame ranks Newman alongside both John Williams and Ennio Morricone. Newman’s late solo records (especially 2008’s Harps and Angels and 2017’s Dark Matter) and 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction highlighted a solo voice grown so sturdy and probing that it almost seemed like his Hollywood scores came out of a different head. After all this, Hilburn argues the impossibility of regarding Newman simply (or only) as a satirist. Newman’s Grammy-winning 2016 release of “Putin” counts as a triumphal election-year burlesque, and has only grown more alarmingly prescient since the invasion of Ukraine.

If you want more from Hilburn’s narration, he tilts the balance with the sheer number of Newman quotes, which take unexpected turns. When the BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs asked about his favorite recordings, he picked Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135—the Hollywood String Quartet recording from the 1950s, a worthy contender for a definitive selection. “I love musicians, and I always have,” Newman says. “They’re people who’ve accumulated tens of thousands of hours alone in a room getting good at what they do—much like snipers do.”

When Newman finally won an Oscar (after 15 nominations) for “If I Didn’t Have You,” from Monsters Inc. (2001), he bounded onstage to flip one more cliché: “I don’t want your pity.”