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Randy Newman:
The Bluerailroad Interview
page 2
So you haven't been working on any songs for yourself?
I got a few. But it's coming funny. Usually I write a really simple kind of Country song to start with, and I have done that. Pretty much so, yeah. But I'm leaving them. I'm not a good finisher anymore. I'm not finishing off the three or four that I have. I'm hoping that I'll have a better idea.
When you say you need stamina, some songwriters have said their best ideas come all at once, words and music. Does that happen to you?
Sometimes, yeah.
But it takes stamina to stick with it?
It takes stamina to go in there and sit, and work at it, unless you're optimistic about a final result. Which I haven't learned. I'll start and it will sound terrible to me, absolutely terrible. I never think I'm gonna get anywhere with what I'm playing, where things are taking me. No plan. So it makes you want to quit, and do something else. Particularly when you don't exactly have to do it. The world isn't waiting for the next Randy Newman record - like, you've got to have this record. Those days are gone for the whole record business.
I saw Paul Simon play at some special memorial kind of thing, and I also heard James Taylor - on the last picture I did, he sang a song ("Our Town," from Cars) - and both those guys (Simon did "Bridge Over Troubled Water" but he was playing different kind of chords with it - when I get a song, I don't mess with it, I leave it alone), but I admire both those guys, for looking for chords other than I-IV-V-I. It's not easy. They're trying to find something better, not just taking what comes. Sometimes you just take what comes, and that's the best thing to do. Not revise.
Simon is one of the few guitar-based songwriters who has consistently written wonderfully complex chord progressions with great melodies -
Taylor, too - that's pretty fancy, that stuff -
Yeah, he'll use an augmented chord and stuff like that-
Sting will, too. But it's slightly different. It's jazz oriented.
Do you find the use of the guitar in songwriting has diminished the harmonic range of popular songs?
Well, in rock and roll, itself, from 1953 or 1954, the beat itself did a lot to diminish harmonic invention, and to narrow the harmonic vocabulary and make it small. When something is beating behind you, I-IV-V just sounds great. "Louie, Louie," I like it. And I love a lot of that stuff. Carole King, early on, knew the repertory. It's obvious she knew Irving Berlin, Rodgers, and all that stuff, and there'll be some of that stuff in her work. But it really did do that, and you can see why the old dinosaurs - they're too good to be called dinosaurs, actually - but arrangers who did the Big Band stuff, and people who knew that music and loved it, they would just hate rock and roll. They just would never get over it, how really simple and primitive it would sound to them. And their attempts at it were terrible. You would see sometimes in movies when some composer had to do a rock and roll thing, it would be just embarrassingly bad. They just had no feel for it. It's not often that people can do both.
Do you think the piano is inherently a better instrument for writing inventive harmonic music?
Well, I can't think of too many major composers, except Berlioz, who played guitar. But he got places. If you're a tremendous musician, it doesn't matter much.
Such as the Beatles-
Yeah. And they get the piano, easily. When I tried to play guitar, I never got past the F chord. It hurt my fingers. I didn't have the stamina for that. But, no, not necessarily. And it's hard for me to say, I haven't listened close to what's going on, but in Rap, sometimes it's harmonically fancy. Or Heavy Metal - I remember hearing Megadeath, and they sometimes go to odd places. Maybe it's just things bumping into each other, but it sounds like they're trying to do something. It's not simple. Jimmy Page, it wasn't simple what he did, and that's guitar. What with layering now, and synthesizers, you can get to those places. And there's nothing wrong with a straight diatonic approach in a pop song. I've done it most of the time.
Simon, like you, is a rare example of someone whose words are as inspired and inventive as the music. There aren't many songwriters - even Tin Pan Alley writers - whose words were as good as their music.
No. It's the rarest commodity in pop music. Because it's not really wanted that much. And the beat, the groove, is an overpowering thing. [Sings part of "Staying Alive," by The Bee Gees.] Like I say, these are ancient references, because I haven't paid attention to [laughs] anything current. It's the music that does it. When I first started hearing Rap, it was straight Rap. There was no melody. I knew in general, they would have to get some hooks in there. The public is never gonna put up with something they can't sing along with. I knew at some point that would change. And now some of those guys like 50 Cent are singing the fifth. And Eminem is too. And they're getting music in the middle of things.
Do either words or music come more easily to you than the other?
[Pause] I think words that interest me are a little more difficult. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't have been more comfortable in a world of words. If I hadn't had music in my family and all, I'm not so sure that I would have been a musician. If I wasn't pushed in that direction, if I didn't just have to make music. But words I may have had a gift for. I probably don't anymore. When I try to write a letter, I can't find the right word to use.
When you approach songs, do you finish a melody before you finish a lyric?
Sometimes. Never the obverse. Or I'll finish the form of it, and know where it's got to go.
Do you ever come up with ideas for songs when you're not working at the piano?
Very rarely. More so recently. I've started carrying a notebook around. Because I have gotten ideas apart from the piano. I got one the other day that I liked. But usually it was always when I was sitting there. It always was when I was compelled to, when I had to. When I didn't, I didn't think about it. Or 'that would make a good song' hasn't occurred to me too much. Sometimes when I've read something, or seen something on television, I might get an idea. There was more of that in the last record, I think, than there has been.
What was that topic you came up with?
I'd like to see if I could write about the big change in Europe and America, where - it's not news - that we're drifting apart, and that it's to our detriment that they're doing a little better than we are in terms of education, in terms of higher taxes and getting the programs that are really better, better phone reception, better roads, less poverty. And they want to pull away. Naturally, the mass culture is still McDonald's, and the [American] movies, and Starbuck's and things like that. That's our big hit everywhere. But in general they don't want to be like us. They always protested that they didn't want to be like us, but they did. And now they really don't. And we should emulate them in some ways. That's a change, and it's a good one. But it's not very singable. But I can do it, probably.
You've taken so many subjects that might not seem ostensibly singable, but you've pulled it off -
Yeah, that's true.
Has there ever been a subject you couldn't make into a song?
No. Oh yeah, there have been a bunch of things I couldn't do for whatever reason, but I can't think of anything that you couldn't deal with. Music isn't great for transmitting a lot of information. You can tell a lot about character by what you have him say. I sometimes forget that that's what I like best about some of the stuff that I've written, that it reveals more about the narrator than he knows about himself.
On the last record I made, which was too long ago, was Bad Love, and I did want to see if could legitimately do pop music at the age of 55 or whatever age I was then. And write from that perspective. And not an old croc perspective, necessarily, but where you could legitimately do it and still be doing that kind of music. All that talk about 'we're not doing this when we're thirty,' or 'we're not doing this when we're forty,' there's some validity to it, and everyone forgot about it, you know, because they just went on. You know, 'here we are, we're still doing it.' But some of the stuff doesn't work anymore, because they're too old.
But I'm satisfied that I succeeded in doing that, and those songs, as a bunch of songs, aren't inferior to what I've been doing. I think they're just as good as any batch of songs that I've written for any record. But I don't want to write from that perspective all the time. I don't always want to be an old guy chasing a young girl, and that kind of thing. I don't want to have to do that. I don't want to have to be in my songs, I never have.
Occasionally you are in your songs, as in "I Miss You," or "Dixie Flyer."
Yeah, but it's not exactly true. They're about me, yeah. In fact, they're all about me - as I've said to you before - you can guess more about what I'm like and what I think from my stuff than you could about people who are ostensibly self-revelatory in what they're doing. If you had to guess what I think about this, that, or the other, you'd probably be right.
Bad Love certainly isn't inferior to your past work. Which is unusual - most songwriters wrote their best work in their twenties -
90% of them.
And there are few who haven't.
Have you ever written about that?
Yeah. I spoke to Simon about that.
What does he think? He's done it, Neil Young has-
He said, "I can do it, because I'm still as interested in it as ever."
And really focused.
How do you explain your ability to do it?
Well, it's always been life or death to me, like it is to him. And also I think doing the movies has kept me in shape. Able to do it. I care a lot about it, but that's not to say other people don't. The thing about it is, that's interesting to me, is why. Why during that period of time did Lennon & McCartney, Carole King - and why not later? And I think some of it - some of it is focus - but some of it is competitive. When Lennon was with McCartney, and they were writing not with but against each other [laughs], in a way, when you're in the middle of it, when you're in Aldon Music or you're in a group, and there's other people writing all around you, that's when people did that great work. The great songwriters of the period right before it, they stayed, they were doing it for thirty years, forty years. They were writing for other people, they weren't up there themselves, performing and making tons of money, and being warped by fame and fortune.
Take Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart is not taken seriously as a songwriter the way he should be. I don't know whether he was serious himself about his abilities.
I once talked to Chrissie Hynde. I had never met her, and I saw her at a recording studio a couple of years ago. And I said, "Geez, I'm really a fan of your writing. I think you're one of the best writers ever in pop music." And it was like she didn't know what I was talking about. She thought I was kidding her or something. It's like she didn't feel that way about herself.
But it isn't like classical music, in which people get better and better. People do their best work before they're 27 quite often in rock and roll. Much more often than not.
Many songwriters I've spoken to, like Simon or Petty, seem to really enjoy the process-
I don't. I hate it.
And yet you continue to grow in your work.
I don't know whether Simon enjoys the process. He never told me he enjoys it. Petty might. It certainly is a saner way to go about things, to look forward to it, to love writing. Stevie Nicks used to love writing, she would write hundreds of songs. But Henley and I always hated it. [Laughs] But you know the old saying: "Only a fool would write for anything other than money." That's one of the sayings. Another one is, "Writing can be very difficult, but having written something is great."
Yeah, you've said in the past that when you get something going, then you enjoy it.
Yeah, when something's working. The first flush is good. You might get down on it the next day or something. But that first thing is the reason for going through hours of dead time.
When you are working on something that is going well, do you always finish it?
I've had things lately that I've put aside, but I used to finish them. I might be faking. I'll think, "Oh, I'm happy enough with that," and go watch television. It's like I'm getting lazy or something. And also, it's all pretty simple harmonically. It's bothering me. Blues-oriented stuff. I get better and better over the years at writing for my voice. And it's limiting. If I'm writing for assignment, like "When She Loves Me" for Sarah McLachlan, or a different song for James Taylor, which I just wrote for Cars, I write differently. It's like if I'm writing for an oboe or a bassoon.
You once said you were pushed into being a singer of your own songs -
Never thought of it. But I would like the way I did them better than the way people were doing them. So I wasn't quite pushed. But I never thought of it.
Did you think you would be a songwriter for other people?
I thought I was gonna be a movie composer. But then Lenny Waronker suggested that I try to write some songs. And like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, he went around pushing me. So I remember playing for Lou Adler. And I would play the melody along with myself. (Later he called me 'Lenny's Robot.') I was 17. And he said, "You know, Carole King, she plays something different when she sings." And I thought she was the greatest at the time. And I was right. So I did.
And then we went to see Leiber & Stoller out in New York. And Leiber said I should move out there. He said, "You'd be one of the top people in five years." I was real young, real young.
(continued ...)
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