Randy Newman News

Life is a battle between inner dreams and outer reality. Some artists and songwriters devote the bulk of their work to the first half of the equation, puffing up the good feelings and placing reality in a haze. Others focus on the anarchy of the world at large and squelch the dreams with heaps of anger.

Then there's Randy Newman. The guy has an acerbic, morbid fascination with the demons of power and poverty. But that coincides with an underplayed tenderness. Newman placed both of them on display Sunday in a 2-1/2-hour concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, mixing the bitter, the sweet, the clever and the provocative in an intelligent mirror of the interplay between the individual and social influences.

Postponed seven months ago when Newman broke his wrist, the concert experience was not dissimilar to reading the newspaper in the morning. He delved into money, power, racism, corruption, natural disasters and politics -- topics that mix knowledge and emotion in the news but don't get much serious discussion in popular music.

But just as the ritual of reading the world news over morning coffee might contain mundane discussions about who's taking the kids to school or picking up the dry cleaning, Newman's big-picture societal rants were balanced by quirky lyrical asides and by ballads with a more personal, reassuring nature.

In "The World Isn't Fair," for example, he deftly wove the failure of Karl Marx's communist doctrine with his son's failures at school, finding a common thread between them. "Feels Like Home," meanwhile, created a warm intimacy, a contrast to the happy-go-lucky "I Love L.A." that preceded it and the stately circus music that followed in the cynical "It's Lonely at the Top."

Newman, who played unaccompanied piano on the Disney hardwood floor, may hail from the rock era, but he's equally at home with older genres. He casually assessed classical composers Shostakovich and Wagner alongside Steve Miller and the Seeds. And where the bulk of modern-era singer-songwriters would cite Dylan as their inspiration, Newman's songs tended more toward the cadences and theatrical, internal rhyme schemes that populated the works of Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer.

Newman offered a fair amount of sarcastic commentary between the pieces, and while he kept his audience laughing with his offbeat wit and self-deprecation, he notably cracked a smile himself just once amid the one-liners.

The humor included a story from the late-'90s ("Many of you may remember the 20th century . . ."), when Newman, 62, came to terms with the meaning behind his graying hair.

"My manager said it's brown, but I'm a realist," he quipped.

That big dose of grounded realism and informed skepticism came through loud and clear in Sunday's performance. It was so abundant that in those moments when he did take on the role of the dreamy balladeer, even those sentiments seemed quite real.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter