1/6/2024 0 Comments Alfred newman cd![]() ![]() He has managed, over nearly half a century, to find major record labels more than happy to subsidize him (he is currently with Nonesuch, a division of Warner Bros., where his recording career began), and, this summer, he will release his 12th, as yet untitled, studio album. for the songwriter, who turned 72 last November. I think I’d have been interesting, right? But I don’t know whether anyone would have subsidized me, or found me as interesting as I did.” The Family BusinessĪs it is, things turned out O.K. ![]() ![]() He went on: “I’ve often wondered if I’d have kept going in that direction, accompanying myself with an orchestra and taking things apart, what I’d have been. Back then, I felt it was almost like cheating to have a drum. It was like Homo robustus-well, no, because robustus wouldn’t be the right name for not having a drum. Newman described the new American music that he and his colleagues were attempting as “a branch of Homo that didn’t become Homo sapiens. And, lo, the choogling rock hegemony prevailed. Another ambitious album of the period, also of young-composer provenance and non-rock atmosphere, the Beach Boys’ Smile, with music by Brian Wilson and lyrics by Parks, was famously abandoned by Wilson, left incomplete. Why not wed that heritage to contemporary pop songs? For Randy and a few young compatriots in his native Los Angeles, including his fellow singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson and the two men who produced Randy Newman, Lenny Waronker and Van Dyke Parks, the late 60s were a time of open-ended pop possibility.īut the dream didn’t pan out those late-60s albums got good reviews but didn’t sell. Two other uncles, Emil and Lionel, were also composer-conductors. His eponymous debut album, released in June 1968, was heavy on strings and light on drums, its songs at once tuneful and outré, describable only in odd compound terms like “movingly sarcastic” (the bum’s-eye-view ballad “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”) and “mordantly tender” (the album’s opener, “Love Story,” whose young narrator envisions his and his girl’s entire future together, all the way to being sent away by their children to a retirement home, where they’ll “play checkers all day, ‘til we pass away”).īig arrangements came naturally to Newman his uncle Alfred, the oldest of his father’s six brothers, had from 1940 to 1960 been the musical director of Twentieth Century Fox, overseeing what was widely regarded as the best studio orchestra in Hollywood. It’s a notion that Randy Newman has often contemplated, especially when he thinks back to his early recording career. And not in that proficient but retro-skewing Connick-Bublé way, but progressively, with new wrinkles and developments coming year after year. Not in opposition to rock, but alongside it. ![]() Cohan, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Frank Loesser, and Burt Bacharach-had continued to flourish. Suppose that pop music-in the pre-modern sense of the term, as in American popular song, the kind of music once enjoyed by grown-ups and kids alike, from the time of Stephen Foster to the heydays of Scott Joplin, George M. Suppose, for a moment, that teens and electric guitars hadn’t won. ![]()
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