What Is Randy Newman's Best album?
From his 1968 debut to 2008’s Harps And Angels, via film work; tell us how best to negotiate his back catalogue.
THIS MONTH WE'RE fixating on the oeuvre of Randall Stewart Newman, who’s long cast his satiric gaze on life’s paradoxes with an unsentimental, jocular humanity. But where do you start with someone who’s written so many golden songs, and entered the universal songbook with compositions like I Think Its Going To Rain Today, You Can Leave Your Hat on and When She Loved Me off the Toy Story 2 soundtrack? And which of his albums are best – the early ones by the strikingly mature twenty something, including 1972’s Sail Away? Later seventies LPs including Little Criminals and Born Again? How about 1983’s Trouble In Paradise, featuring the scathing My Life Is Good, or later works like 1999's Bad Love and 2008’s Harps And Angels? There’s also the many film soundtracks this Oscar-bagging scion of a Hollywood composing dynasty has written.
So tell us your choices and reasoning via the comments below. As ever, the best suggestions will appear in the How To Buy section of the next issue. Cheers!
