RANDY NEWMAN Debut Album

Original released on LP Reprise RS 6286

(US, June 1968)

Have so many good songs been so ruthlessly butchered by a performer? Probably hundreds of times. But here the songwriter and the butcher are the same person. It is difficult to describe Newman's singing on this album: painful is an obvious word but it seems inadequate. Often he wobbles around the tune but never quite manages to get it, instead he pushes it through a meat grinder. And there he is on the back of the sleeve, looking like an insurance salesman - but in his turtle neck sweater he looks like an insurance salesman trying to look hip, but in his attempt he just underlines that he is as square as a breeze block. But then listen to the songs: they are Randy Newman at his best, neither hip nor square, just unique. They are not the easy cynical smuggery he was later to lapse into, they are suggestions for short stories that call for mixed and contrasting responses. "Bet No One Ever Hurt This Bad" has one of Newman's favourite subjects, the jilted lover, but here the abandoned lover sentimentalizes his failure, bragging about his emotional pain - typically we are called to feel for the singer's sense of loss, while being amused by his self-aggrandizement, while perhaps recognizing the sentimentalizing in our own behaviour. "Living Without You" is a sincere and touching response to the same predicament - perhaps all the more touching when contrasted to the previous song. "Linda" is yet another response to the same situation, but here Newman responds in a slightly hackneyed way: is he just being corny or is he pointing to the corniness of the situation? I presume the latter, but that doesn't stop me from finding the song touching. Newman sings to an often lush orchestra and the orchestrations are clever and crafty and ambitious (vastly more interesting than his later use of violins on, for instance, "Good Old Boys"). And it is worth pondering where Newman comes from: he is obviously not rock and roll, and he doesn't come out of the folky traditions that most of the interesting North American singer-songwriters of his generation came from - he is closer to older traditions, the Hollywood scores of his uncles or the pre-rock and roll song: but he has transformed then into something new. These songs had a big impact on me when I was a teenager and after hardly listening to them for years I've spent the weekend listening to the album time after time (it is less than 30 minutes long - Newman is concise) - I don't think I'm suffering from nostalgia, they just seem remarkable songs. And I'm even getting used to his singing again. (And I haven't even mentioned the unsettling "I Think It's Going to Rain Today", one of Newman's finest songs and one of the great songs from his generation of American songwriters.) (in RateYourMusic)