'Short People' songwriter celebrates 30 years of music

By David Kligman, Associated Press writer

SAN FRANCISCO -- Randy Newman admits his songs are hardly the stuff of hit records, and to prove his point he recounts the working titles for his first pop album in 10 years.

"I'm Dead But I Don't Know It" is a semi-autobiographical farce about an old rock 'n' roller (with a chorus of girls chanting, "He's dead. He's dead"). There's a song about Karl Marx called "The World Isn't Fair." Another, "Great Nations of Europe," describes how Europe has been successful in transplanting its culture.

"Sounds like a smash, right?" says Newman, laughing.

Newman, 54, points out he also has a sentimental side, so he wrote "I Miss You," a song devoted to, of all people, his first wife. And just what will she think of such flattery?

"She'll probably love it," Newman says. "It's what my second wife thinks that will matter."

Of course, Newman has never played it straight during a career that's being celebrated next month with the release of the retrospective box set "Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman" (Rhino, $59.98).

The 105-track collection includes the bespectacled singer-songwriter's first single, "Golden Gridiron Boy," produced by Pat Boone. It also features a disc showcasing his film scores, compositions and arrangements from "Ragtime," "The Natural," "Parenthood," "Avalon" and "Toy Story," among others.

The bulk of the selections are from Newman's 10 studio albums, including his one big hit, "Short People," written from the perspective of a man ranting about the vertically challenged. The song offended countless people in the mid-1970s and even prompted a death threat while Newman was performing in Memphis, Tenn.

"There were people who were generally angry and still are," Newman says. "I underestimated people's sensitivity to it. It's so clear to me the guy is nuts that I just didn't think anyone would really take it seriously."

Newman thinks more of his songs would have outraged people -- if anyone had heard them.

"Rednecks," a single from the 1974 album "Good Old Boys," sounds as inflammatory as any song ever recorded but actually is a diatribe against hypocritical northern states that are just as bigoted as some parts of the South.

Newman may have been misunderstood, as the box set demonstrates, because his pop songs are like short stories -- first person narratives with that person generally being a drunk, pervert or other social outcast.

"I reached a point where I was writing relatively conventional songs," Newman says. "Musically, they were all right, but it wasn't what I was responding to in literature and television and comedy.

"I love not being able to trust necessarily what the person's telling you. You have to figure out by his diction or something what the truth is. And since I'm not Faulkner, it's a little more basic and simple."

The other revelation is that many of his songs deal with Southern themes and locations -- "Louisiana 1927," "Birmingham," "Kingfish." This, from a Southern California resident who recorded the unofficial theme song of Los Angeles, "I Love L.A."

It turns out Newman's mother was from New Orleans, and he lived the first three years of his life there.

By the early 1980s, Newman began composing movie scores. It was not much of a stretch considering his uncle, Alfred Newman, was an accomplished composer who also created the Twentieth Century Fox march. Two other uncles, Emil and Lionel Newman, also composed and conducted film scores.

Now, having never been a huge star, Newman's music is heard by millions of moviegoers even if they don't know he's responsible. He has been nominated for 10 Academy awards, but has never won.

Newman's latest project was providing the music for "A Bug's Life," the new Disney/Pixar computer animated film. He also wrote "That'll Do," a song performed by Peter Gabriel for the upcoming "Babe" sequel, "Babe: Pig in the City."

Scoring movies has been the hardest thing he has done, he says.

"I want what's happening up there to be enhanced by the music," Newman says. "A chase without music is nothing. The 'X-Files' without that brooding music is just two people sitting in a chair for two minutes. Add the music and it's tension."

He considers composing music for films his full-time job, although he says it's the right time to venture back into pop music. And he's not worried if the album isn't a hit.

"It's sort of like I missed the point about what the whole pop thing is," he says. "'I love you. You love me. Why don't you love me any more?' I just stopped doing that 30 years ago and, if I hadn't stopped doing it, right now I'd probably be painting in Bora Bora."

Photo by The Associated Press
Composer Randy Newman leans against his piano in his recording studio in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.