“A national treasure”: The songwriter Don Henley thinks America has misunderstood
During his time in the Eagles, Don Henley learned all about being misunderstood. Their biggest song, ‘Hotel California’, is an inscrutable beast. Even psychologists specialising in understanding the feline mind empathise with those trying to figure out the mystic, musical analogy. It’s a critique of capitalism and the American dream, but that message is so obscured, you wouldn’t be surprised to see Donald Trump dancing to it at a rally sometime soon.
However, perhaps political misuse is preferable to some of the harrowing fates that Henley’s songwriting hero has faced. After all, the Eagles were never so misunderstood that death threats flooded their way to such an extent that they had to cover as much of their head with the microphone as possible when they performed live for a period.
This was the unfortunate fate that befell Randy Newman. The songwriter’s biggest hit was one he’d rather have traded in. ‘Short People’ is a vicious, perfectly pop-infused tirade against damn stinking little folks sung from the perspective of “a maniac”. The only issue is that upon its release, many people thought it was sung from the perspective of Randy Newman, who, for some reason, had become the first songwriter to openly develop a prejudice against the diminutive bastards who scurry around by his shoelaces.
He was labelled as some sort of heightist bigot, rallying a revolutionary cabal against vertically challenged citizens, and as such, received a string of cautionary letters, written in un-joined-up handwriting, presumably from less than burly six-footers. Newman himself would admit that the response was indicative of the wider fate that has befallen him as the Dean of American Satire.
For a time, he would bravely play live shows, trying to obscure his delicate areas from view, fearing a little bullet from a little gun, while touting a pleading rhetoric that the song actually highlights the absurdities of discrimination. With the accursed anthem, Newman ironically broke into the upper reaches of the charts for the first time. The outrageous song happens to be so upbeat, immediately catchy, and joyously fun that it foisted the greatest punchline on pop by baffling the populace and avoiding all platitudes, including typical prejudices.
As a master composer, he dances pop to his whims like a marionette. And he remains misunderstood as a result. It proved for certain that everything is laced with irony when it comes to Newman. This was also evidenced when his old friend Henley told him to write about what he knows. “I wrote ‘I Love L.A.’ because Don Henley said to me, ‘Everybody’s writing LA songs, people not from here. You’re from here. Why don’t you write one?’,” Newman told Rolling Stone. But he didn’t cut his resultant track straight, explaining, “There is an aggressive ignorance to the song—ignorant and proud of it.”
This typifies Newman’s songwriting, often scribbling his tracks from the post-modernist perspective of an unreliable narrator. In this regard, he has, if anything, simply outsmarted the charts. For the likes of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, this makes Newman a genius, and Henley is happy to join those esteemed peers.
“Randy Newman is a national treasure,” Henley told the Los Angeles Times. “He’s a songwriter’s songwriter; a musician’s musician. He’s also probably the most misunderstood and underappreciated recording artist alive.”
Newman’s nous on this front is also proven by the fact he has mastered the ways of music to the extent that writing for others has always been easy. It was his days on Tin Pan Alley that first brought him to Henley’s attention. “I didn’t know much about Randy when I moved to Los Angeles in 1970,” the Eagles man continued. “I knew that I liked a dark little love song called ‘I’ve Been Wrong Before,’ that had been recorded in the mid-1960s by British singer Cilla Black, but it didn’t get much airplay in this country. And I wouldn’t know until years later that Randy wrote that song.”
Soon, he delved into his back catalogue and lapped up the sheer depth therein. You could even argue that Newman’s satirical ways inspired the Eagles to offer up a mirage-like look at the death of the American Dream with ‘Hotel California’ because his style of songwriting encouraged a more literary approach. After all, Henley had been studying literature long before he became a musician, but aside from Newman, not many others were willing to apply the tricks of prose to anything approaching rock.
As Henley explains: “Randy had a couple of hits — ‘Short People’ (1977) and ‘I Love L.A.’ (1983) — that were social satire, but most people took them literally. So, in a sense, it’s something of a paradox: On the one hand, those two songs got airplay, got his name out there into the public, but he got pigeonholed by the success of those songs, and that’s a shame, because they’re only the tip of the iceberg. They don’t fully represent his depth and range. There is so much more to his body of work.“
Concluding: “He’s one of the only living songwriters who can get ridicule and empathy into the same song. Sometimes, he works in the realm of irony; other times, he’s a heart-on-his-sleeve romantic. The combination of his lyrical genius and his deep ability as an orchestrator and composer is powerful stuff. There’s nobody quite like him.“
Newman has the unique artistic potential to broaden your understanding of the art form itself—to push you towards a new songwriting understanding and welcome you into a wider canon of greats.
Take, for instance, his offering for the film Meet the Parents, ‘A Fool in Love’: the manic operatic stylings of the song’s intro guarantee one thing for certain, the track was never going to be a hit. But 46 seconds into the confounding maelstrom of music, the opera settles down into a gorgeous, poetic ditty with a lilting melody that lowers cholesterol and welcomes sunshine into a couple’s abode. At first, you might wonder whether the bewildering choir and Tchaikovsky-esque bellow in the intro are worth shunning radio play for, but it is that exact reason that makes Newman great—not just great, in fact, but one of the greatest songwriters of all time. It’s the sound of the mania of looking for love before you settle down.
You see, in pop culture, we don’t just love virtuosos – the punks proved that – we love the stories that people tell. And Newman is one of the finest musical storytellers there is. His tales have three dimensions and technicolour, while much of pop is a 2D black and white facsimile. If he is singing about some poor bastard with a sore head after a breakup, then there will be dissonance in the mix, not just some slightly sombre melody. That might have made him “misunderstood” by many, but “a national treasure” to those in the know.
