Newman's songwriting stands the test of time
A review from the Boston Globe of a recent concert at the Berklee Theater.
By Joan Anderman
It's a testament to the twisted tides of pop culture that Randy Newman is best known for a song from a cartoon movie about toys. Before he scored ``Toy Story," Newman was famous for a novelty tune concerning the height-challenged -- a biting parody of bigotry that an astonishing slice of the population thought was actually about some angry piano dude's problem with short people.
Of course, that slice -- the ignorant, the stupid, the mean-spirited -- has provided Newman with a rich vein of material. Add to that the artist's own copious supply of self-loathing, political savvy, romantic longing, and wicked humor -- folded over 40 years into a body of work that bridges the pop standards and the rock era -- and Newman is starting to emerge as one of the great American songwriters.
And he's incredibly entertaining to boot. During his nearly 2 1/2-hour concert at Berklee on Tuesday, Newman, who performed alone at the piano, chatted and joked like a familiar friend. Meanwhile, the tunes piled up like so many small, unforgiving snapshots, tempered with Newman's signature wit but no less potent for their humor. A striking number of the older songs now sound eerily prescient. The ethnocentric bullies of ``Great Nations of Europe" and ``Political Science," the devastating flood of ``Louisiana 1927," the bumbling red-staters in ``Rednecks," and the delusional privileged class of ``My Life Is Good" are all leading players in current events, and were skewered to perfection by Newman.
The master social chronicler does warm and fuzzy, too -- in his own fashion. ``This is a love song I wrote for my first wife while married to my second," he said before ``I Miss You." Newman's exquisitely pretty ballad ``Marie" is, in the end, a scathing self-portrait of an unworthy lover. ``I don't have anything to say/But I'm going to say it anyway," he crooned, off-pitch and froggy, in ``I'm Dead," a droll critique of geriatric rockers.
Technically, at 62, Randy Newman is one of them. But with new songs like ``A Few Words in Defense of My Country," in which he catalogs the shortcomings of Nero and Caligula, Newman sets himself apart from his peers in pop music.
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