After many years writing about my enthusiasms, I’m still fascinated by the relationship between expectation and actual enjoyment.
After many years writing about my enthusiasms, I’m still fascinated by the relationship between expectation and actual enjoyment. How often have we seen a film everyone has been raving about, and been vaguely and obscurely disappointed? Or read a book of which we expected nothing, and loved it to pieces? My most complex relationship of this sort is with the CDs I have bought but haven’t played yet. They sit in a drawer in my desk, silently berating me for not having put them on as soon as I got home. It’s not that I buy so many that I don’t have time to play them (well, I don’t think so, anyway). But just as one might delay eating the best piece of pizza until last, so I feel inclined to put off possibly indefinitely the discovery that the latest album by some chronically underperforming former favourite of mine is just as poor as the past few have been. Call it deferment of disappointment, if you like.
So it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I finally listened to the new Randy Newman album, Harps And Angels (Nonesuch) — ‘new’ in the sense that it was released 15 months ago. In pop music, where success is usually achieved young, artistic decline can be long and slow and painful. After five magnificent albums between 1968 and 1977, and two not-bad ones in 1979 and 1983, Newman released just two studio albums, the weary Land of Dreams (1988), and Bad Love (1999), which received the best reviews of his career but seemed very slender to me. If you are best known as a mordant, satirical lyricist (whose legendary ‘Short People’ is apparently still misinterpreted by the dim-witted), more fond of the unreliable-narrator device than possibly any other songwriter alive, then critics are likely to give you a little leeway when your tunes aren’t up to scratch. My own belief is that lyrics count for little without memorable music. (This would explain, for example, Morrissey’s solo career.) In the 1980s Newman turned his attention to movie soundtracks, which brought him welcome piles of money and Oscar nominations, and spent years writing a musical version of Faust, which didn’t really work on record or on stage. That could be another good rule of thumb: when a famous and much-loved pop performer starts writing a musical, the game is probably up.
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.
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