Old guy in the '90s: "the way one's whole frame of reference—from expressions like "two bits" to events like the Second World War—changes from lingua franca to a dead language. Oh sure, Bad Love says, you can go out on the street and speak it, but not only will people give you a wide berth because you're talking to yourself, you'll feel like a foreigner in your own country."
Thirty-five years on, ‘I Miss You’ from Bad Love still makes me laugh and cry at the same time. I find it profoundly moving, for its music and its message. Its far greater than the gag that he’s writing to his ex-wife, and “I’d sell my soul and your souls for a song.” The sense of loss is real, it’s as honest as Randy Newman ever gets. It may sound like a simple song musically – the repetitive piano arppegios, the limited melodic line – but it’s carefully thought out, the way the chords and leading notes support the story. Its suspended chords keep you guessing (you don’t have to know anything about theory to know what that term means: the music keeps you in suspense, Springsteen used them constantly on Born to Run). You’re already weeping at the piano introduction, anyone with a heart knows where this is going. There are no tricks or unreliable narrators in the lyrics, this is heart on the sleeve. You’re almost halfway through before the payoff: “So I’ll pour my heart out. / I miss you … I’m sorry but it’s true.” The strings lay the melancholy on thick. Then the leavener: he knows his ex is laughing herself sick, way up in Idaho. But the closing bars show he means it; the piano slows down, and he says he wanted to write one more song before he quits, and this one’s it: “I still love you so.”
Bad Love and the two albums that have come since – Harps & Angels and Dark Matter – have been padded with songs he could write in his sleep, as you say (‘Lost Without You’, ‘Wandering Boy’, ‘On the Beach’, ‘She Chose Me’, even ‘Feels Like Home’). These are formulaic: appropriate in a film but insubstantial on an album of originals. And there are the mini musicals (‘Shame’, ‘A Piece of the Pie’, Dark Matter’s ‘Putin’, ‘The Great Debate’, ‘Brothers’) that show he hasn’t got Faust out of his system. ‘Sonny Boy’ is the best of them, full of sass and swing. Maybe Randy’s original albums since Bad Love are like those albums of 78s before Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours: you pick out the discs you like, and leave the rest for a different mood. For me, his most consistent album since Good Old Boys is The Meyerowitz Stories: solo piano, almost improvised while watching the film (like a silent movie pianist), using melodic tropes that expose a personal vocabulary that goes back to Russia. Its honesty is compelling, you wallow in the melancholy. It’s as heartbreaking as ‘I Miss You’, without the gag.
Old guy in the '90s: "the way one's whole frame of reference—from expressions like "two bits" to events like the Second World War—changes from lingua franca to a dead language. Oh sure, Bad Love says, you can go out on the street and speak it, but not only will people give you a wide berth because you're talking to yourself, you'll feel like a foreigner in your own country."
Funny image.
I thought Newman enjoyed himself quite a bit when singing "The Great Nations Of Europe" on Bad Love.
Thirty-five years on, ‘I Miss You’ from Bad Love still makes me laugh and cry at the same time. I find it profoundly moving, for its music and its message. Its far greater than the gag that he’s writing to his ex-wife, and “I’d sell my soul and your souls for a song.” The sense of loss is real, it’s as honest as Randy Newman ever gets. It may sound like a simple song musically – the repetitive piano arppegios, the limited melodic line – but it’s carefully thought out, the way the chords and leading notes support the story. Its suspended chords keep you guessing (you don’t have to know anything about theory to know what that term means: the music keeps you in suspense, Springsteen used them constantly on Born to Run). You’re already weeping at the piano introduction, anyone with a heart knows where this is going. There are no tricks or unreliable narrators in the lyrics, this is heart on the sleeve. You’re almost halfway through before the payoff: “So I’ll pour my heart out. / I miss you … I’m sorry but it’s true.” The strings lay the melancholy on thick. Then the leavener: he knows his ex is laughing herself sick, way up in Idaho. But the closing bars show he means it; the piano slows down, and he says he wanted to write one more song before he quits, and this one’s it: “I still love you so.”
Bad Love and the two albums that have come since – Harps & Angels and Dark Matter – have been padded with songs he could write in his sleep, as you say (‘Lost Without You’, ‘Wandering Boy’, ‘On the Beach’, ‘She Chose Me’, even ‘Feels Like Home’). These are formulaic: appropriate in a film but insubstantial on an album of originals. And there are the mini musicals (‘Shame’, ‘A Piece of the Pie’, Dark Matter’s ‘Putin’, ‘The Great Debate’, ‘Brothers’) that show he hasn’t got Faust out of his system. ‘Sonny Boy’ is the best of them, full of sass and swing. Maybe Randy’s original albums since Bad Love are like those albums of 78s before Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours: you pick out the discs you like, and leave the rest for a different mood. For me, his most consistent album since Good Old Boys is The Meyerowitz Stories: solo piano, almost improvised while watching the film (like a silent movie pianist), using melodic tropes that expose a personal vocabulary that goes back to Russia. Its honesty is compelling, you wallow in the melancholy. It’s as heartbreaking as ‘I Miss You’, without the gag.