I know some of our Townspeople dig Randy Newman and will find the release of Harps and Angels, his first album of new, non-soundtrack material since 1999, to be an occasion for joy. The New York Times opens its Critics’ Choice review with these words:
Randy Newman can do saccharine and he can do sour. At his best, though, his songs deliver complex flavors, with a pungent but searching ambivalence. “Harps and Angels,” his first album of new songs since “Bad Love” in 1999, presents a mess of conflicting feelings and motives. Intermittently brilliant, occasionally belligerent, it presents a vision of American identity as sprawling and ultimately as confused as the country itself.
Wow, it’s like the guy assembled that paragraph out of a box of Rock Critic Refridgerator Magnets! Ignore my sarcasm; I have been working on appreciating the guy the last few years, even going as far as to buy an album and burn a copy of another. Mitchell Froom co-produces this new one! Fans of Randy Newman and fans of Rock Town Hall, I urge you to consider supporting both Newman and the Halls of Rock by buying this album through the portal that follows. Thanks!
You can also see Randy talk about and play one of the songs from the new album (Potholes) in a video on the Nonesuch site:
http://nonesuch.com/media/videos/randy-newman-potholes
Nonesuch is really pushing this release. It’ll be interesting to see if it actually sells. The previous one, Bad Love (on Dreamworks) supposedly sold well under 100,000.
Hey BigSteve,
What do you think of this album? So far, I’m thinking it’s kind of scattershot. It doesn’t quite sting the way Bad Love did. I have some theories why this is so.
To be honest I find it a little over-produced. Maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten so used to hearing Newman solo at the piano, but the orchestrations here feel sort of like they’re beating me over the head to make sure I get the point. I don’t see that the extra instruments add anything at all to A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, which was devastating in its original version.
The concert NPR is streaming where he plays the entire album backed by a small combo seems more effective to me than the album, at least so far. All the film work Newman’s done in the last couple of decades has made him a much better orchestrator than he used to be, but I’m not sure these songs need the extra artillery.
And I’m afraid the film work may have drained him of a lot of melodies that would have been put to better use in these songs. A few of them are basically spoken monologues with piano accompaniment. Not that there’s anything really wrong with that, but I like it when someone who doesn’t have a great voice sings. Anybody can talk.
I’m being a little hard on the album. Maybe I was expecting too much. Newman is certainly a better songwriter than pretty much anyone else out there, and I hope the album does well. The reviews have been spectacular. I need to listen to it more I think.
But I definitely think re-recording Feels Like Home as a straight love song was a major mistake.
While I found myself very much liking the new songs, I agree with your criticisms, BigSteve. Yet I think the reason Newman si not singing as much is that he’s doing a lot more storytelling on this record, which requires a dry, deadpan delivery.
One thing is clear: Newman remains able to be funny and politically astute at the same time.
Lastly, why do you think re-recording “Feels Like Home” was a mistake?
Are you familiar with Faust, dr. john, which is where Feels Like Home Comes from? I don’t have the booklet anymore, but Bonnie Raitt sings the song in Faust and she’s the good-time girl, Martha, not a nice person. When she sings the song she doesn’t mean it. She’s just playing someone for a fool as usual (the Devil himself, I think, not Faust).
Now even I’d fall for that song if Bonnie Raitt sang it to me, but I think the song derives much of its power from the concept that it’s a lie. We don’t look to Randy Newman for sincerity. In fact he’s often complained about the fact that people sing Marie as a sincere love song, whereas in the context of Good Old Boys, the character who sings the song is a drunk loser who treats his wife, the character he’s singing to, like shit.
I admit that there are no real clues in this song (as there are in Marie) that something is amiss, and I understand that there is a long tradition of songs written for Broadway shows acquiring the status of standards by divorcing them from their original contexts. For example, When She Loved Me, one of Newman’s most beautiful songs, and the one he should have won the Oscar for (he lost to some trifle by Phil Collins!), can work perfectly well on its own, even though in Toy Story it’s a song sung by a girl to a doll, but that recontextualization doesn’t really go against the basic nature of the song.
Maybe if I’d written a perfect wedding song like Feels Like Home, I’d want to cash in on it too. But I shudder at the thought that this recording might encourage evil people like Josh Groban to record it to make listeners swoon. I prefer to let lesser artists work the sincerity fallacy. By making this song the album’s closing track, it throws off the album’s delicate balance and gives the impression that all the earlier snarky material was all in good fun but uncomplicated sweetness is the point of the album and the artist.
Yeah, I know, I’m a hardass who can’t just relax and enjoy a pretty song. Plus there are flutes in it, so I’m not responsible for my reaction.
It’s funny you mention the “monologue” aspect of these songs, BigSteve. I too am not a big fan of the use of this device on the album. I was actually going to ask you if this device had some precedence in New Orleans R&B or something.
I guess my main complaint with the album is that everything seems very on-the-nose. The great thing about Newman’s stuff is how unclear-cut most of it is. He usually does this in two ways. The first is a twist that takes the song and narrator in an unexpected direction. The most obvious example, I guess, is the Southern racist correctly pointing out the racism of the North in “Rednecks.” And there’s very little of this on Harps and Angels.
But the second way is in some ways even more valuable, and that’s the little non-sequitiers he adds in the lyrics, things that don’t get explained or neatly tied up, and they also help flesh out the narrators. Like from “Naked Man”: “They found out about my sister/Kicked me out of the Navy/Would’ve strung me up if they could.” And again, twists like this are sorely lacking on the new album.
I too had high hopes for this album, perhaps too high. I think we may have been spoiled by Bad Love which is sort of his Bill Clinton album. So I thought his George W. Bush album would be even more brilliant and scathing, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In a way, I think Clinton — a smart, Southern, libidinous Baby Boomer with a big persecution complex– is a character Newman can latch onto more easily. Also, Newman inadvertently already captured the Bush era with “Political Science,” which is pretty tough to top.
Finally, I actually don’t think recording “Feels Like Home” was a mistake. It is a very lovely melody; he’s earned a crack at it. And I think it gains a new resonance here, different but equally valuable from the one on Faust. On this album, it sounds like he’s recognizing that while overriding institutions are fucked up and constantly fucking up the people they’re supposed to serve, those people can still find hope and solace in their personal lives. This idea is also one of the things David Simon addressed in the last episode of The Wire.