For the last 55 years or so, you’ve had a friend in Randy Newman, if you have a thing for songs that offer eviscerating, uncompromising, even devastating dissections of the human condition and the American experiment. Or, sure, kids’ tunes, or laugh-out-loud funny ones, or memorable film-score cues — yes, all of those things, too. But the case for Newman as popular music’s greatest social commentators is the one being pressed most of all by critic-turned-biographer Robert Hilburn in his new book, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman.”
Since leaving his post as one of the nation’s most well-known rock critics, a job he held down at the Los Angeles Times from the late ’60s through 2005, Hilburn has written four books, including the ultimate biographies of Paul Simon and, before that, Johnny Cash. He sat down with Variety to discuss why he was driven to celebrate the life of Newman, who somehow continually comes up as underrated even while being easily one of the most lauded rock singer-songwriters of all time. Hilburn gets into the impact of growing up under the shadow of three famous film-composer uncles (Alfred, Lionel and Emil), being steered away from classical and driven into pop music by his childhood friend Lenny Waronker (who went on to guide his career at Reprise Records), and how a turn into film scoring fulfilled his family destiny. HIlburn also explains why he thinks Newman’s latter-day albums are as good as landmark 1970s efforts like “Sail Away.”
Were you considering different people to follow up your biographies of Paul Simon and Johnny Cash, or was it inevitably Newman?
I realized that of all the time I spent at the L.A. Times and the great acts I saw, I might love the flash of some people, but it’s the songwriting that I care the most about. If you don’t have good songs, I’m usually not interested in what you can do instrumentally, or anything else. And it’s interesting — all three of these people I had reviewed or met by 1970. There must be some comfort in watching a person’s career and feeling comfortable: I know that person. With Cash, I’d been with him in Folsom Prison [when his iconic 1968 live album was recorded], and I had come from a small town in the South, so I really related to him. But after that, I went back to the songwriting thing.
I wanted to do a great songwriter, and on my list, the first one is Bob Dylan — I’m not saying he’s the best, but he’s the most important songwriter. He changed how songs are written. He made people want to be songwriters the way Elvis made people want to be rock ‘n’ rollers. But you can’t do it; I mean, it’s just impossible. He’s not gonna cooperate, and I don’t want to do a biography based on what’s written about a person. I want to look them in the eye and feel them and ask the questions I want to and satisfy my own curiosity before doing a book on somebody. So I said, who are the other songwriters I most admire? Simon makes a lot of sense. He’s a big seller; he goes from “Sound of Silence” to “Graceland.” But in doing that book, instead of just telling his life story, I wanted to make a point about how the creative process evolves, and that was the underlying narrative of the book. And I got a great Stephen King tweet that that was one of the best books he’s ever read about the creative process.
So now I say, who else is on my list of the top five? There are a lot of candidates for (numbers) four and five — Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, maybe Springsteen, maybe John Prine. But the first three, in whatever order we want to put them, are Dylan, Simon and Newman … even though he’s not as mega-famous. A lot of people think of him as the “Short People” guy and couldn’t get beyond that. Millions of people can hum along with the Pixar songs. But when you ask them about “Roll With the Punches” or “Mikey” or “Christmas in Cape Town,” they’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. He could have been a beloved figure if he just kept writing songs like “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” and “I Love the Way You Smile.” Those are wonderful songs, but I don’t think they’re great songs. It was a crusade, because I wanted to tell people how great this guy is, because of songs you probably don’t know about.
These social commentary songs were strange; some had the N-word in it. It was not considered viable. Even when the single “Short People” came out, that was the first hit single he had, and that was the biggest selling album, “Little Criminals.” But people have told me at Warner Bros. that they had a lot of people bringing the album back because people thought it was going to be a comedy album. But he is expressing significant themes about the shortcomings of the American character — the racism, the sexism, homophobia, and greed. The more I look at it, those songs are as timely today as ever.
What is a favorite Newman song of yours?
“Marie,” that’s a great song. And people often ask, what’s your favorite Randy Newman song? It’s so hard. But if I were naming five, one I would definitely push in there is “Louisiana 1927.” Because it tells you so much about his artistry. There was the flood in 1927, and he read the books about it. So many musicians have written about that, from all kinds of blue figures to Dylan even writing a song about it, “High Water (for Charley Patton),” and they all approach it in the same way: “my suffering — I lost my wife, or I lost this, it was a terrible thing.” Randy, based on all those things he had read, he was like, well, why was this? And he learned that the government let down the people so badly — the city government in New Orleans, the national government — so he writes about that: the issue of how the power structure, the elite and the greedy, ignore poor people and don’t protect them.
And so when Hurricane Katrina comes, that song (gets revived), because it’s not just about the suffering. All these people feel this: they betrayed me. And it becomes almost like the state anthem. And those lines… “The wind was coming from the north.” The South always thinks the north is putting them down and berating and cheating them. And then that last line, “they’re trying to wash us away.” I mean, it’s a brilliant song. It’s not like “Sail Away,” which is immediately fantastic, but it’s such a quiet, beautiful piece of art, to look at this thing that all these other people examined, in a different way. You know, there was a great Babe Ruth photo one time when he was leaving baseball, and a hundred photographers were lined up in front, and one guy went in the back and you see Babe Ruth from behind. That’s what what Randy did in in that song. That’s the hidden genius that’s not particularly obvious unless you sit down and really spend time with the song and think about it.
He rarely writes about his own life, although there are a very few telling exceptions.
With the song “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today,” he always kind of disliked it, and I think the reason had to do with that. I didn’t realize quite how difficult it was for him to talk about personal issues. And I think he got irritated a couple times because I was just asking normal questions, trying to (peer into his personality). And with “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today,” he finally kind of said, “Well, I think I didn’t like it because I thought it was too close to me.” So, see, to me, that song was him. That was too personal. He is always finding this unreliable narrator, so that he doesn’t have to be the one saying the thing. You don’t expect it to be him.He can say, “It’s not me,” and he’s got an alibi.
Some of his characters, he emphasizes with more than some others, where he’s clearly depicting them as vile. One thing he really gets angry about, whichever point of view he’s writing about, is bullying. That seems to be a throughline, writing about cruelty, from the schoolyard taunts of “Four Eyes” to writing a song about a tyrant like Putin. But the way he expresses the cruelty can be so funny, you’re laughing while you’re wincing.
Because he was bullied. He had that crosseyed thing, and there’s a line in a song about how he would walk backwards into school. His brother said he got beat up in line because he said, “You can’t cut.” So part of the thing is that I wanted to discover what things in his life led to this thinking. Bullying was one. And for all the troubles his father caused with him, his father was a very moral person, and I think Randy looked up to that. So that helped too.
With the humor… He sang a song to a friend’s mother when he was 6 or 7 or 8 or 9, I forget which, and the mother laughed, and he remembered how humor is a way to get through to people. Humor in a song is a way a lot of times to disarm somebody… to disarm and also attract. It’s part of his thinking, that if you can put it in a funny thing, you can really make a lot of points.
But you point out he resisted the idea of being thought of as strictly a comic writer, and he does have songs without a laugh in them, or that are very subtle in their satire.
That was the point after “Political Science.” “Let’s drop the big one. They hate us anyway” — everybody likes that the first time they hear it, and it’s still current today. But he said he didn’t want to be Tom Lehrer. And people started reviewing him almost as a standup comic. So he had to get away from that, to a degree, because that’s an easy target — you know, nobody wants war. So then he really said, “OK, I’ve gotta do songs where not everyone’s gonna agree.” So he wrote “God’s Song” (satirizing popular conceptions of God’s goodness, or existence). He wanted a tougher target.
You got many of his relatives to talk, as well as friends. How many people did you interview?
It might’ve been around 50. I really could have done the book if if I just talked to 15 core people, but when you start interviewing people, you don’t know who the 15 are gonna be.
He has friends, and he loves going out and playing shows and loves the applause and all that kind of stuff. But aside from that, everything I was told about him is the solitariness. Still, he doesn’t lock himself in a room. His friends are all welcome to come in. The great thing is, without Lenny Waronker, there would not have been this story. I don’t think Randy would ever gone into pop music. He might have gone into classical music and struggled and done well, but I don’t think he would’ve gone into pop. Lenny did that. Lenny, the guy who used to play baseball with him in his backyard, still goes over to his house every day and they watch television and movies and do stuff together. It’s a sweet story. That intimidation was so strong from his uncles, trying to compete with them, and then you have Lenny pulling him up, saying, “Why don’t you try pop music?” And Randy says in the book, “It wasn’t that pop music that seemed easier. It’s that I have somebody backing me up saying, ‘That’s good, that’s great.’ He never got that from the family. And he said, “Lenny was my spine. He was my backbone.”
I found that Randy does not like talking about his personal experiences, because he never wanted to be pictured or seen as a victim. He didn’t want people to know, particularly, that he was cross-eyed, because they would say, “Oh, that poor guy.” He wants people to listen to the songs. And his uncles always said, “Don’t talk about yourself. Don’t reveal things about yourself. Don’t be a braggart. Just let the music speak for itself.” And that seeped down into him, so he’s very, very conscious of not talking about himself. It would have been very difficult to do the book if you were just relying on him.
When you approached him about the book, was he into it?
No. Neither was Paul Simon, because they’re both private people. That’s why when you’re looking around, people hadn’t done biographies on them. I mean, people did biographies of Paul and Simon & Garfunkel, but they never talked to him. And Randy had been part of a family that never bragged. His uncles, who were working in Hollywood, would say, “These actors are always coming on the set and bragging and making up stuff. They’re just stupid.” So somehow him doing a book felt like bragging.
He asked, “Do we have to go into the family?” And I said, “Well, only to the extent to help me understand why you’re writing what you’re writing. We don’t have to have a lot of that, but it is an important part of it.” So then I didn’t hear back for about a month or so. But I talked to Lenny before I ever talked to Randy: Do you think he would be up for it? “Oh yeah, I think it’d be great.” So I think Lenny kind of lobbied for it. And then it took maybe four or five months before he finally said, “OK, let’s do this.” Paul Simon, he wanted to do it, eventually. But I didn’t know if Randy was doing it because Lenny says this, maybe Gretchen (his wife) says this, maybe his kids say this. I didn’t know if he was doing it because everyone said it’s a good idea or because he wanted to.
The family members contribute a lot, in filling out details and adding some psychological context.
He’s the one who said, “Are you gonna talk to the kids?” And I said, sure. A lot of families of celebrities, they don’t want to say anything that offends the star or blows his image or anything. So when I started talking these kids, I was amazed. I mean, it’s partly a reflection on Randy that he encouraged the kids always to be open and talk and honest and feel comfortable. His brother Alan called him after I asked to do the interview and said, “What do you want me to say?” Randy said, “Say whatever you want.” That really is his thing. And it says a lot about the honesty and the fearlessness he encourages, just in the way that the kids were ready to say anything. Some of the stuff, they’d say, “I don’t know if I really should say this or not.” But they would just sit and talk like we’re talking. It wasn’t any act of courage or anything. … And Lenny, he’s like a family member, too, and he just tells you exactly the way he sees it and feels it. Gretchen, his wife, was like that — she was incredible.
So those are the people that told me the story, and their stories all lined up, and they had no concern (about candor). Randy’s not afraid of the truth. But sometimes it’s better if someone else says it.
He doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. You know, he doesn’t want to be the one criticizing his uncle who didn’t ever encourage him. And the problems he had with his father, he doesn’t want to be talking about that, or his health problems. He just wants to talk about the music. So the question is, in the music, how many clues are there? Randy’s wife and his brother Alan say that there’s something in almost every song that he sees as something personal, but Randy disguises that personal stuff pretty well. But it’s in there. So what really struck me was how wonderful his extended family was in telling you exactly the story, and it couldn’t have been done without them.
How much time did you spend interviewing him?
I probably ended up talking to him for somewhere between 30 and 40 hours. Sometimes things were much better than other, because he wasn’t in pain. We started during the pandemic, so we did a lot of his interviews on Zoom, and then later I would go over to his house and do others. He had all these operations, and he would be spending two, three months to recover and get his strength back before he could sit down and talk without pain again, so there was some waiting.
“I Think He’s Hiding” is a song Randy wrote about God, or the absence of God. How much do you think Newman is hiding, or in plain sight, in his music? And how forthcoming was he finally with you?
He was very free in talking about the music. The more it got toward the personal… I didn’t feel like I was being relentless, grabbing him by the collar! But to him it was hard. But there were times he would really open up. I think he knew what these other (family members) were going to tell me, too.
He does like to be invisible. And he found this unreliable narrator, which coincidentally turned out be not just a protective device, but a fantastic device for him to express his ideas.
Lenny said he’s the most loyal, decent kind of person, and I never saw any evidence that that’s not true. There’s a lot of generosity and decency in Randy. I think he tries to see the best in somebody, actually. I think he’s an optimist at heart, and he loves the country. I think it’s important to know that he’s not a nasty, savage kind of person. There’s a decency to write these songs, and he’s not just bitter and all that kind of stuff. There’s shock that the country has become what it’s become.
In some of his songs, the satire is right there on the surface, and in others, it may take a little more insight to find where the barb is.
You take a song like “Rednecks”… He didn’t want to be a protest singer, and I mean, Dylan got out of that as soon as he could. But with Randy, rather than say “segregation is bad, racism is bad, you shouldn’t do it,” he takes the words of a racist and puts that in the song, realizing a person can see how absurd it sounds. He found a voice to express what he was criticizing. It’s a minor song in terms of no one ever mentions it, but I love a song called “Mikey.” It’s about a bar over in Long Beach, I think. The guy is saying, “Look at all those colored kids. Look at how the neighborhood changed. Listen to the terrible music they’re playing today.” And he says, “Why can’t we hear more of ‘The Duke of Earl’?” And the great thing about it is, “Duke of Earl” was a Black song… I think those (subtler) statements are as good as the bold statements in “Rednecks.”
The film scores are the most commercially successful part of his career, and have to take up a good part of the book, but it doesn’t seem like those would be naturally of as much of interest to you as the body of songwriting. Did you have to kind of compel yourself to become as interested in the scores?
I could feel Randy once in a while saying, “Why aren’t you asking more about the music?” [Laughs.] With mostly instrumental music… it wasn’t a torture to write about “The Natural” or “Avalon.” It was a torture to write about “Leatherheads” and “Maverick” and some of those — which he doesn’t have any interest in, either.I didn’t know how to convey the music as much as I do the (lyrical) themes, because I definitely care about the songs more. To him the music is just as important as the themes, though.
I talked to the directors in some cases, and Barry Levinson was very good. I talked to Michael Roth, an arranger who has worked on him with many things, including the musical “Faust” (in a production just put on in L.A. at the Sorayan). I wanted him to be as complex as he could be without having the reader say, “Well, I can’t understand that,” but enough to have them say, “Well, it is pretty serious what he’s doing.” And then I really spent a lot of time with John Lasseter, and “Toy Story” was interesting to me, because of how it related to Randy starting to write music when he was around 5, while he’s watching cartoons. And then Jon Burlingame, who’s a film music critic — I tried to go through his eyes, too, to see what’s important there.
How do you think Randy looks back on his film music career, overall?
On the film side, once he had “Toy Story,” he was making a million dollars a picture, I believe. The films made him much more money than the significant songs, which is where I think the greatness is. But he didn’t always get the substantial, dramatic movies that he would like to have, with films more like “The Natural” and “Avalon,” maybe because of “Short People” and being known for comic, funny music. When he made “Maverick,” the guy said, “Can you make a funny scene here?” Whereas Noah Baumbach (who used him for two dramatic scores in recent years) knew he was capable of more. But that was probably frustrating. There’s a line in in the book where he says to his agent, “Can’t you get me something besides another toon?” I mean, he had like 10 in a row. He had the temptation for more, but then he stopped and went back to those significant songs.
You are a big advocate for his last trio of solo albums.
Those last three albums I think were just incredible. I would put them against “Sail Away” and “Good Old Boys.” Most people don’t know about them, because fans always stick to what they heard and they loved first. It’s the same with Dylan never being able to top his ‘60s albums (in fans’ minds) or Springsteen with “Born to Run.” It’s always those things you hear when you’re younger and they mean so much to you, and you just don’t care as much about music at a later point in your life. But if I were giving an album to somebody to listen to, I’m tempted to give “Dark Matter” (his most recent album, from 2017), because that’s such a range of stuff, from that “Great Debate” song to “Wandering Boy” and the song about the Kennedy brothers. His writing is as good as ever or better, and because he’s gone through all those film scores, he has even more brilliance in arranging things. The other two, “Harps and Angels” and “Bad Love,” they’re really great albums, too.
You do ask in the last chapter whether we’ll get more out of him. He’s given the world so much, and with the health setbacks he’s had, including breaking his neck a few years ago, certainly no one wants to pressure him, but of course fans want more, whether it’s records or shows.
He certainly wants to do shows, though he has to have another knee operation before he could do that. Every once in a while he’ll tell me he’s written another song, but I don’t know if he’s on the path (to making an album). But he enjoys being out; he really loved the “Faust” weekend (at the Soraya in September).
Did you find what felt like a culmination of his story, for you?
One of my favorite chapters is the scene at the Hollywood Bowl where he performs with his cousin, David Newman, conducting, and it unites both ends of the family. He’s gone past the intimidation of the (previous generations of his) family, and maybe more importantly, he’s relieved his relationship with his kids. He loves when the grandkids come, and that’s when he seems happy.
Thomas Newman (a cousin who is also a noted film composer, from “The Shawshank Redemption” to “1917”) talked for 20 or 30 minutes about how much he loves and how intimidated he was by Randy… just like Randy was intimidated by his father. He said, “How could I not be…” He goes through and looks at these songs and starts talking about “Sail Away” and this and that and he says, “You know, he’s the greatest Newman.” I said, “Really? Greater than your father (Alfred)?” He says, “My father could have never written these songs.” Now, I didn’t think it would be effective if I said anything like that in the book, but to have a member of the family say it…
Do you know what book is next for you?
I don’t know. I would like to figure out how to take some the best interviews (from the L.A. Times), like the Springsteen interview before “Born to Run” where he’s talking so seriously about his career, and it was so unexpected to hear a person that age talking that seriously about you have to dig deeper in songs. I would take some of the Dylan interviews. I mean, I guess if you take a thousand of the columns, half of ’em were worthless, but if you take the top 50, they were really good — and they’re all about singer-songwriters. You could say singer-songwriters have kind of disappeared, but someday, they might come back, and these stories will tell (the next generation) a lot about what they went through in their process.
It’s been almost 20 years now since you retired from the L.A. Times, after holding down the chief pop music critic job there almost 40 years. Do you have any thoughts on the current state of music journalism?
I just think it’s so different because the internet really diminished the power and influence and the excitement of the critic. There was a time if you lived in L.A. and you wanted to hear about the Bruce Springsteen concert, you’d have to wait a day and a half and the Times would come out and I’d tell you about that. It was like the only voice you had, though you might talk to a friend about this and then. Now, the moment you step out of the concert, there’s a thousand tweets. So I think two things have happened. There might be hundreds of thousands of tweets on every subject before you’re gonna get it up. And secondly, the kind of singer-songwriter that I admire is less valued today, less present today — though there are other artists who have that quality, like Kendrick Lamar, who is incredible. So I think it makes the quality of music journalism harder.
