Randy Newman's Faust

 My favorite American singer-songwriter made a musical version of Faust in the 90s that nobody knows about. One day I'll do a long piece on my weird love of Randy Newman - a love that I pretty much have all to myself. Everybody but me finds him insipid. I'm in that weird substrata of the Anglophone world that thinks he's something close to a genius.

Let's face it.... the level of musical and poetic invention in most pop music is not great, to say nothing of the singing... The difference between Randy Newman and the rest of them is

1. The quasi-operatic pretensions of rock are gone. The pretension is not particularly endearing when opera does it either, and Randy Newman strips away the varnish. He is about as far from a 'rock god' as a rockstar gets.Once you leave the production and high-tech behind, you're left with colloquial rhymes, unsophisticated harmonies, sung by people with bad voices. The difference is that Randy Newman's songs are quite a bit more sophisticated - harmonically, poetically, and thematically. Another reason people don't like him is that his influences go into the uncool parts of American music - Ragtime, Dixieland, Tin Pan Alley, Brill Building, and first generation R&B. Can't do much about the voice though... which is as bad as anyone's on the planet.
2. Because Randy Newman is an 'everyman', there is no pretense around how colloquial his music is. It sounds much less sophisiticated than, say, the Stones or Clapton, but it's in fact quite a bit more. This is an artist who's also a deep social critic, whose harmonies and arrangements (many of which he does himself) are incredibly sophisticated by rock music standards, and while other rock gods let us avoid the human condition, Newman steers us straight into life's tragicomic river.
3. From the beginning of his career, Newman was an adult while his contemporaries were still children, and they're still playing at children as they get to eighty. Newman realizes that life itself is tragicomic, and his music reflects the richness of emotional experience that can make us laugh as easily as it can make us cry. Like Mozart or Brahms, Newman is not trying to get our adrenaline pumping, he's trying to equalize our emotional temperature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VvSjvljbLs&list=PLWZBlPcT9yJirckM1JpsU6dm8he96dRPP&index=