Randy Newman
Harpes And Angels

By Jeff Ehrbar

“The end of an empire,” Randy Newman laments on Angels and Harps, his first studio CD in nine years, “is messy at best.” But messy can be funny.  If Nero fiddled while Rome burn, Randy Newman is tickling the ivories, Bourbon Street style, with his usual acerbic wit and commentary.

While you probably know Newman for his numerous movie soundtrack hits (“You Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story), he’s written some great, musical satire for 40 years now.  Newman’s favorite targets usually include the discrepancies in U.S. income (“It’s Money That Matters”) or our narrow provincial thinking (“Short People” “Political Science”). On Harps and Angels, he continues to take aim at these subjects.

Central to Harps and Angels is “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.” The beautiful, pith string arrangements and strolling steel guitar deceptively soothes Newman’s anger and sadness at our country’s decline. Newman first argues that while our leaders are “the worst we’ve ever had,” they aren’t as morally deficient as Caesar, Hitler or Stalin (some comfort). Newman’s wrath then turns to those that have manufactured fear for political use: “a President once said ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself/now we are suppose to be afraid/it’s patriotic and color-coded.” Leaderless and fearful, Newman observes, “we are drifting in the land of the brave/and home of the free.”

Even more aggressive is “Piece of the Pie,” a nightmarish, Brechtian romp through the failed America dream. Newman hammers home the economic pressures currently squeezing the middle class: “you’re working harder than you ever have/living in the richest country in the world/wouldn’t you think you’d have a better life?” Health care is killing us (“if you lived in Norway you’d be fine right now/you get sick there, you’d make the doctor wait”) while foreigners control our assets (“Johnny Cougar’s singing ‘It’s My Country’/he’ll be singing for Toyota by the fall”). Who does Newman believe will lead us out of this morass? Newman cowers when asking for “a piece of the pie,”—like Oliver Twist asking for more food, knowing that he isn’t likely to get it.

The funniest song on the album is “Korean Parents.” Noting the problems with teen discipline and school performances in the U.S., Newman proposes putting Korean parents up “for sale” to work as surrogates for their less successive American counterparts. Against a spiraling female aria sounding like a bad Star Trek theme, Newman asks us to “look at the numbers/that’s all I ask/who’s at the head of every class?” Korean achievement isn’t genetic — “they just work their asses off/their parents make them do it.”

While Newman’s obviously agitated about the state of the country, he looks at the passage of time with resigned askance. On “Only a Girl” the narrator is puzzled why the young femme fatale (“she doesn’t eat/but she’d eat you alive”) has her eyes on him, while on “Potholes” Newman holds that lost remembrances aren’t necessarily a bad thing (“thank God for potholes on Memory Lane”). “Losing You” is more somber and beautiful, with Newman not only lamenting a lost love but also the lack of time he now has to recover from heartbreak.