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His is a typically implausible Newman tale of woe. The slow, bluesy “You Can’t Fool the Fat Man” features one very simple piano, a horn section, and one of Newman’s feckless narrators-a guy with a hard-luck story looking for a handout. They’re just more sarcasm, the mean icing on a cruel cake. I don’t buy his empty platitudes about the brotherhood of man any more than I buy his saying it’s a wonderful world. Instead I suspect it’s the narrator’s ultimate joke on his listeners. Little Criminals opens with what is perhaps Newman’s most famous song, “Short People.” Behind its jaunty piano and happy horns there stands one very cruel narrator, tossing off lines like, “They got little noses and tiny little teeth/They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet“ and “They got grubby little fingers and dirty little minds.” Then comes a seeming twist, in the form of a bridge that goes, “Short people are just the same/As you and I/(A fool such as I)/All men are brothers/Until the day they die/(It’s a wonderful world.)” This could be Newman’s way of unsaying every mean thing he’s said (“Short people got no reason/To live”), but I suspect not. Newman is a surgeon poking about in our heart of darkness, with his razor-sharp scalpel of sarcasm. The dark thread that connects the clueless partygoer of “Mama Told Me Not to Come” to the freezing midnight purse-snatcher in “Naked Man” to the impotent bridegroom (“Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword?”) in “A Wedding in Cherokee County” is the unhappiness that lies at the heart of the human condition. It’s likely no one has ever written as many mordantly funny songs as Randy Newman satiric songs that cut so many ways, harboring sly irony beneath their apparent meaning, and a deep well of incurable sadness beneath the sly irony. His 1968 eponymous debut, Harry Nilsson’s 1970 LP Nilsson Sings Newman, and his 1970 sophomore LP 12 Songs all helped establish Newman’s critical reputation as a songwriter of immense talent-a reputation he solidified with 1972’s great Sail Away.

He began his career writing tunes for performers such as Petula Clark, Jackie DeShannon, and Gene Pitney, and was briefly a member of the band that became Harper’s Bizarre. Both cities have played a critical role in his songwriting, and his time in The Big Easy helps explain his uncanny ability to capture both the southland’s mindset and dialect in such albums as Good Old Boys and 1988’s Land of Dreams.

It’s not quite the piece of undiluted perfection that 1974’s Good Old Boys is, but it has gads of great songs on it, and is 100% guaranteed to make you happy to still be above ground with the grotesqueries, unreliable narrators, heartless comedians, and feckless characters that Newman, a genius at writing vignettes without resolution, specializes in.Ī very brief bio: Randall Stuart Newman was born in 1943 in Los Angeles, but spent significant time as a child in New Orleans. But that’s okay, because Little Criminals is my number two. I of course have one, and it isn’t Little Criminals. Songs like “Guilty” and “Marie” and “Baltimore,” the last of which is the musical equivalent of your dog dying-in your arms.Įverybody should have a favorite Randy Newman album in order to qualify as a bona fide human being. Newman) is best known for his comedic songs, but he has written some of the saddest songs I know. Randy (yeah, I call him Randy you, on the other hand, may address him as Mr. Why, it warms the cockles of my heart, it does, the way ole’ Randy has of telling a tale, and whenever I hear a fella disparage him as a creator of film scores for rug rats, why, I want to haul off and belt that fella in the mouth, take a bit of the smart-ass shine off his canines. Randy Newman is a storyteller without equal.