Great expectations

But Harps And Angels is wonderful. More fool me for letting it sit in a drawer for a year. Recorded with piano, orchestra and a little Dixieland band, it’s about as rock’n’ roll as the National Trust. Newman sings about fear of death (in the title track), geopolitics (‘A Few Words in Defense Of Our Country’), American child-rearing techniques (‘Korean Parents’) and Jackson Browne (‘A Piece of the Pie’), all to glorious, rolling, bluesy melodies. It’s his most consistent and inspired set since Little Criminals in 1977. Another rule of thumb emerges, maybe even a fully fledged hypothesis. After a barren, wasted middle-age, the verging-on-elderly pop star suddenly wakes up and produces his best music in a quarter-century, before it’s too late. It happened to Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. I would argue that it applies now to Paul McCartney. And here’s Randy Newman, 66 last week, at the top of his game once again.

The clincher is his version of ‘Feels Like Home’, a touching and unusually straightforward ballad that first appeared on Faust, beautifully sung by Bonnie Raitt. Since then others have had a go at it — Linda Ronstadt’s version is especially lovely — and now, before it flies completely beyond his reach, Randy has given us his own reading, which is scarcely less touching for being sung in his ungainly, crabbed croak of a voice. Of course, now I have raved about this album, I have raised your expectations to such a level that the album can never live up to them. My disappointment is deferred no longer; instead it has just been transferred to you. Expounding all these critical opinions, maybe all we are doing is playing a form of cultural pass-the-parcel. I suggest you pass it on quick, before the music stops.