Randy Newman - 12 Songs poll

Looking forward to revisiting this weird & underrated album.

Haven’t listened to the whole thing in a while but a favorite has always been “If You Need Oil”, which is just a perfect summoning of the wonderful haunted lonely feeling of working somewhere alone late at night (in the pre-smartphone era at least), just staring off into space and wishing someone would visit. “How can you be sleeping when you know that I’m awake”… chills every time.

Have to go with Old Kentucky Home

"Let's Burn Down the Cornfield" invents Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits.

When I first heard "Let's Burn Down the Cornfield," it sounded like it could've been done for a lost Twin Peaks episode, even though it was released twenty years earlier.

“if you need oil”

"Cornfield" became a wild mini-standard at the time, covered by Lee Hazelwood, Sam "The Sham" Samudio, Lou Rawls, Long John Baldry, Etta James...

I feel that this is his most listenable album, just in terms of setting a mood over and above the lyrical content. Maybe it's helped in that by the modest scope and simple arrangements of most of those songs.

I really love the summery sound of this record. the songs are great too.

Cornfield for sure. Eerie as hell

This is my favorite Randy Newman album. Just perfect, and put together they all feel like character sketches occupying the same dark and twisted world.

("they" being each of the 12 songs)

What about "Yellow Man"? Its placement right after "Underneath the Harlem Moon" seems significant, as if Newman wanted to create his own portrait of patronizing racism after performing a cover version. But I have to imagine that dealing with anti-Asian attitudes in 1970 would inevitably revolve around Vietnam... so is the idea that the character singing the song is, in his nominally "positive" portrait of the Asian (that he's "just like you and me"), expressing a humanistic and anti-Vietnam war perspective, but in the most fatuous and stereotyped manner possible?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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I guess not a lot of people listen to this?

Regardless, I wish more people did - most people I know hate Newman and they only know him through his movie work. They won't know a song like "Sail Away" or an album like 12 Songs, they just think he makes sentimental fluff for Disney.

I don't mind the sentimental fluff

but also wish I was more into his old stuff, great songwriter

As a film composer, he's not bad at all, but writing for Hollywood films - especially if it's for someone like Ron Howard, Disney, etc. - usually means he's got to lean hard into sentimentality.

To be fair, it's that element that makes some of his earlier records - Good Old Boys and especially "Sail Away" - all the more powerful. It can deconstruct the baggage that comes with those lush, romantic Hollywood orchestrations, and it makes the untrustworthy narration of something like "Sail Away" sharper and all the more effective, emphasizing the myth of the American dream that we shouldn't buy into. Greil Marcus nailed it in Mystery Train, what the narrator is selling is "what America would like to believe about itself, and what ten years of [the Vietnam] war across the ocean and ten years of bitter black faces will never let it believe, even in secret: that everything American did was for the good. Better than good: that God's work really was our own and meant to be. That we brought something new and precious into the world, a land even the most miserable slaves would recognize as Eden."

I still need to do a deeper dive into his earlier songs, when most of his stuff was recorded by other people. I know like a handful from albums I already own (Blood, Sweat & Tears' Child Is Father to the Man, Dusty in Memphis) and the Harry Nilsson album where he only does Randy Newman covers is one of Nilsson's very best (his other Newman covers before and after that album are consistently good). Ace in the UK also has two volumes of a compilation (all covers of Newman songs) that includes a lot of those early songs too.

Those Ace comps are terrific, some really fantastic stuff on there

Misread that, thought it said “Those Ace doubles” and did an, um, double take.

I hoped for 12 votes and got them.

I don't mind the sentimental fluff

I wonder if this is the only Newman studio album with no string arrangements?