Randy Newman

That isn’t the album’s only seduction: The would-be lover of “You Can Leave Your Hat On” has obsessively specific instructions for fulfilling his kinks, but also a bottomless sense of need that finds him repeating “you give me reason to live.” But his demands seem positively wholesome compared to the unfulfilled superstar of “Lonely At The Top,” who tells his fans “go on and love me, I don’t care.” (Newman composed the track for Frank Sinatra, who never got around to recording it for some reason.) God makes a couple of appearances, too: First as the subject of “He Gives Us All His Love,” which details all the affection God has for us as He watches us strive and die down below. It’s either the most reverent song in the Newman catalog or the saddest, depending on how you look at it. Then there’s the monstrous God of “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind),” who stays endlessly amused watching humanity kill each other, call out to heaven, and keep on singing His praises no matter how bad things get. It’s a vision of God as self-serving con man, the kind of fellow right at home in a Randy Newman song.

Next steps: As good as Sail Away is, the two albums around it are even better. Released in 1970, 12 Songs—Newman’s follow-up to his good-but-tentative self-titled 1968 debut—featured Newman working at the top of his abilities. Produced by Newman pal Lenny Waronker, with strong instrumental support by Ry Cooder, Clarence White, and others, 12 Songs features an assortment of desperate, deluded characters, from the jealous lover of “Have You Seen My Baby?” to the too-square-for-the-party subject of “Mama Told Me Not To Come” to the shady narrator of “Suzanne,” who has a dangerous-sounding response to a “for a good time, call” pitch. The album also mixes the sweet with the bitter. Surrounded by loud, angry anti-war songs, Newman took the subversive route with “Yellow Man,” a jaunty number that simply states the shared humanity of people of all races without putting too fine a point on it.

Released in 1974, Good Old Boys is Newman’s masterpiece. A concept album about the American South—both past and present—and the people who live there, it’s alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, lovely, funny, and scathing. “Louisiana 1927” recalls the devastation of a 1927 flood and the maddening indifference to its effect on the poor from the powers-that-be. (Unsurprisingly, it gained a second life in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.) “Birmingham” offers praises to the “greatest city in Alabam’” from the perspective of a native son who’s clearly never seen the rest of the world. Newman, on the other hand, had. He spent much of his childhood shuttling between Los Angeles and New Orleans, and the album benefits from a lifetime of careful observation. That’s never more evident than on “Rednecks,” the album’s opening track, which finds Newman assuming the point of view of an unrepentant racist proud of the South’s tradition of “keeping the niggers down” in order to make a point about condescending Yankee hypocrisy.

Also well worth picking up: The Harry Nilsson album Nilsson Sings Newman, a 1970 collection of covers featuring Newman accompanying his friend on a trip through his own songbook. The 2003 album The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1 also provides a fine introduction, with Newman playing some of his best-known songs, accompanied only by piano. (A second volume is due this month.)

Where not to start: Released in 1968, Randy Newman features some terrific songs, but lacks the consistency of Newman’s best albums. After Good Old Boys, Newman’s output starts to get a bit uneven and then infrequent, as film work started to take the place of pop songs. (As the nephew of Lionel, Alfred, and Emil Newman and cousin of Thomas and David Newman, Randy seemed destined to write music for movies.) The albums Newman released between 1977 and 1988 are all worth exploring, however, just not before hearing his best work. Little Criminals, Born Again, Trouble In Paradise, and Land Of Dreams—the lattermost half an autobiographical concept album—feature first-rate songs next to missteps and less-than-timeless production touches. But even the soundtrack to the failed musical Randy Newman’s Faust has a couple of tracks worth rescuing from obscurity, and Newman’s two most recent collections of new material—1999’s Bad Love and 2008’s Harps And Angels—are strong. Though the cartoons take up a lot of his time these days, Newman’s humane, unsparing wit remains undimmed.