The one musician Peter Gabriel called a “master songwriter”
Any progressive rock musician has been focused on pushing their music to the next level. Although it’s easy to go back and write the same kind of love song over and over again and hope to get one of them to become a hit, it’s much more fun diving into experimental territory and not knowing what you’re going to walk out with. That experimentation only comes from listening to other songwriters, and Peter Gabriel was transfixed when hearing Randy Newman for the first time.
Before Gabriel became the superstar that people know today, though, he was still just a humble schoolboy looking to make artsy music with his friends. As he started putting the beginnings of Genesis together with fellow schoolmate Tony Banks, Gabriel had started focusing on where songs could go, taking on baroque pop on their debut From Genesis to Revelation before landing on their ambitious side on Trespass.
If Gabriel was looking to expand the sounds of rock and roll, Newman was looking to get to the essence of what a song should be. While many of Newman’s greatest songs are known to be criminally short, there is hardly ever a note out of place on any of them, making songs feel like they have existed since the dawn of time.
Outside of his background in everything from classical music to jazz harmony, Newman also had a sharp wit whenever he sat down to write a song. Compared to other singer-songwriters writing about their feelings, Newman played into the cynical side of life half the time, putting together tracks that talked about the dangers of prejudice in songs like ‘Rednecks’ and ‘Short People’.
That’s before Newman even got into the world of soundtracking films. When working on the brilliant scores for movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc., Newman takes some of the wildest chord changes and somehow strings them together with a melody that gave a lot of children their first emotional experiences with music.
When discussing his favourite songwriters of all time, Gabriel thought Newman was unparalleled in his lane, telling ABC News, “Randy Newman is another person I think is a master songwriter and does beautiful arrangements. And I think some of the things he does for films seem deceptively simple, but they are really the work of a master”.
He’s not wrong. Ever since he leapt out of a window on Tin Pan Alley in 1968, Randy Newman has outsmarted the world to such an extent that he has inadvertently imposed his own obscurity. His anthem on the insanity of prejudice ended up enraging people so much that he received extremely prejudiced death threats.
Tom Jones scored a huge hit covering his floundering track on meek sexual ineptitude by making it about macho sexual prowess, and he cataclysmically claimed that all his fans are “ugly” in the disastrous antithesis of Richard Ashcroft’s successful marketing quip that he’s “never had a bad review off a good-looking person.”
While Gabriel may have been quick to highlight Newman’s work in film, it’s easy to see him taking a few indirect cues from his more pointed songs. Since Newman’s songs like ‘Rednecks’ were coming out a few years shy of Gabriel beginning his solo career outside of Genesis, it’s easy to see where Gabriel found the musical courage to speak his mind, going from different stories in Genesis to songs like ‘Biko’.
Despite Gabriel’s attempts to crib from Newman’s songbook, what he does with a piano and his signature voice is almost impossible to duplicate. This is the sound of a man straddling the lines of heartfelt and sarcastic, and somehow in between is where the real person behind the songs lies.
