E-Mail This Article to a Friend More than funny Randy Newman’s original American Songbook BY JON GARELICK

Randy Newman has been a part of the American pop-music landscape for so long that it’s easy to take him for granted, like the Man in the Mountain or I-95. In a way, he’s the quintessential Americana artist. He came of age in the post-Dylan singer-songwriter era, but you can also trace his lineage — through his uncles, the Hollywood film score composers Alfred and Lionel Newman — to the European art song as it’s come down to us through American pop and Tin Pan Alley. But he’s just as steeped in all manner of American roots music — hymns, blues, Stephen Foster, R&B. His songs have been covered by Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Peggy Lee, Nina Simone, and Dusty Springfield. He shows up on the Oscar telecasts just about every year now, having long followed in his uncles’ footsteps as a film scorer. In fact, he’s a little bit of each — songwriter/composer for hire and a "personal" singer-songwriter whose work is quirky and idiosyncratic without always being personally revealing.

Newman’s songs display an acerbic sense of irony and a capacity to take in multiple points of view in the voice of a single first-person narrator. "Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show/With some smart-ass New York Jew/And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox/And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too." Never mind that the "Jew" in this case was talk-show host Dick Cavett (as WASPy a TV comedian as there ever was) and that the voice behind the mask of the unnamed narrator happened to be Jewish. "Well, he may be a fool but he’s our fool/And if they think they’re better than him they’re wrong./So I went to the park and I took some paper along/And that’s where I made this song." Who is this guy? Where but in a Randy Newman song does a redneck singing about a notorious segregationist get all self-referential? The point of view is further complicated when, after sarcastically pointing out that "the North has set the nigger free," the speaker adds: "free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City . . . free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco . . . in Roxbury in Boston." The voice is ardent, angry. From behind the mask of the redneck of the song’s title emerges Newman himself, it seems, in his "true" voice.

Newman, who comes to Berklee Performance Center this Saturday, has long confounded audiences with such jumbled points of view, often to the point of discomfort. (A white man singing about "niggers" doesn’t get off easily, no matter how often the ever-unpopular concept of irony is explained.) Point of view and diction can shift as easily as genre references — God speaking in the voice of a Southern plantation owner, white church hymns crossing with African-American blues, Kurt Weill with Stephen Foster and Ray Charles. Newman has been able to balance and meld his various influences — R&B and the Hollywood/European songwriting tradition — so that you never know when a blues lick will appear to make some commentary on "European" chording or a lyric turn. It’s those little shifts in rhetoric — musical and verbal — that save even his jokiest songs from novelty status. And its his immersion in all manner of Americana — as well as his own laconic vocal style — that makes even his most sophisticated songs sound rootsy and unpretentious.

The new Randy Newman Songbook, Volume 1, due at the end of the month from Nonesuch, spans his entire career in 18 tracks — a little over 45 minutes — in newly recorded performances that feature just his voice and piano (Mitchell Froom produced). The material jumps freely around his career: the Weill-like oom-pah of "It’s Lonely at the Top" (famously submitted to — and rejected by — Frank Sinatra), "Rednecks," "Louisiana 1927," "Sail Away." There are piano solos from his scores for Avalon and Ragtime, the rarity "Let Me Go" (written for a 1972 Norman Lear movie, The Pursuit of Happiness). Missing are his biggest hit, the notorious 1977 "Short People," and the song for which he finally won an Oscar, after 14 nominations, "If I Didn’t Have You," from Monsters Inc.

"It’s not one of my best songs," Newman says of the latter in the press notes for Songbook, Volume 1, "but then again every one of the songs on this album is better than that one." Which is about as down-to-earth and clear-eyed as you’d expect Randy Newman to be in evaluating his own work. Over the phone from LA, he’s much the same. When I tell him how much I liked his 1998 Oscar telecast performance of "That’ll Do," with Peter Gabriel, he says, "That is a good song. That’s from Babe: Pig in the City. We did it with one of those English brass bands, the Black Dyke Mills Band, for the record. That was a good song. But you’re not going to win for a song from Babe: Pig in the City, it just isn’t gonna happen. Unless it’s a big hit, and it wasn’t. The song from Toy Story 2, with Sarah McLachlan ["When She Loved Me," 1999], was maybe the best song of the year, but it doesn’t always work that way. In fact, it most often doesn’t. It isn’t a measure of merit. They might have just wanted to give it to me to stop me from being on the show all those times." He says this last with a chuckle. (After all those nominations, he wound up giving one of the more memorable Oscar acceptance speeches, beginning: "I don’t want your pity.")

Newman’s first soundtrack was for Milos Forman’s Ragtime, in 1981, and that work has taken more and more of his time, so that the flood of new songs he generated in the ’70s (six albums including a live disc) has slowed. Like a lot of us, he works better on assignment — he’s not, as they say, a "poet of inspiration." "I have to sit there," he tells me. "I haven’t had two ideas in my life where I was not trying to have one."

And he says that he returns to his own songwriting almost out of a sense of guilt. "Doing a movie, you have to be working all the time you’re awake or you don’t make the deadline. And this is just me. I mean, the record company is hardly beating down the door for the next Newman record so they can put it out at midnight on Easter Eve. So I have to make myself go in there every day, and that’s the only way I can do it." Of his own songwriting, he adds, "It’s probably what I do best. If I’m one of the best guys doing movies, it isn’t necessarily unique to me, what I’m doing. Songwriting is, to some degree. No one exactly has the same style — or maybe they’re too smart to go down that road. But I feel bad when I haven’t written a new song in a long time, which I haven’t." (Bad Love, his last album of new songs, was released in 1999 by DreamWorks.)

How conscious are his various genre references — for instance, the Stephen Foster references in the opening chords of "Louisiana 1927," from the 1974 Good Old Boys? "I like those regular diatonic chords," he says at first. Then he adds, "I’m thinking about getting the place right. A song like ‘Louisiana,’ the intro to it, that sort of plantation music felt right to me. A song like ‘Cowboy,’ from the first record I ever made, I remember not using a piano because it was an outdoor kind of song and I didn’t hear a piano outdoors. Those kind of rules don’t necessarily obtain any more with what movie music has done. And it’s partly the influence of movie music, trying to get the place right. But it’s a conscious attempt to put you in the place I’m singing about or with the people I’m singing about."

So it’s no accident that the oom-pah and the original orchestration of "Lonely at the Top" suggest Kurt Weill? "It’s minor, and it’s got a trumpet over a sax or over a clarinet — well, it’s also Salvation Army, but it’s Kurt Weill, too." So he’s consciously aware of all these genre choices? "Yeah, I am, and interested in them very much."

Songbook, Volume 1 concludes with a cluster of five politically oriented songs. "The World Isn’t Fair" meditates on Karl Marx and then brings him to Newman’s contemporary Los Angeles and his own "mansion on the hill" ("If Marx were living today," Newman sings, "he’d be rolling around in his grave"). But what’s most unsettling is that the 1972 songs "Sail Away" (about the Middle Passage) and "Political Science," with its opening line, "No one likes us I don’t know why," feel completely up-to-the-minute.

"I could have written them last week. It would be an odd thing to do because people are paying less attention to the issue than they ever have, but it’s just the same. A song like ‘Rednecks,’ which says that the North has no reason for moral superiority where racial matters are concerned. . . . I would say that there’s been almost no change at all. Things in the South are better than they were, definitely. Atlanta is a desegregated town. Los Angeles is segregated. New York is segregated. Boston . . . I don’t know what Roxbury’s like now."

Although in conversation about "Rednecks" he’s scrupulous not to use the incendiary "n" word, Newman says that only once has he felt the heat for singing it. "One person, years ago in Lafayette, Louisiana, a black kid, was upset by it, for good reason from his standpoint. He was sitting in an audience of 1500 white people and he was virtually the only black kid there. And he hears someone he doesn’t know from somewhere he doesn’t know, and these people are yippying and yaying and, he felt, glorying in the fact that they were rednecks. Because it was Lafayette, Louisiana. That was the only time. I never feel confident or happy about saying the word. I would never have used it had I not needed it. It does me no good at all. But it does in the song. It’s a necessity. It’s a very close call whether a white person can ever use that word. It’s not an easy choice. There’s another song of mine, ‘Christmas in Cape Town,’ where I do it, but I’m talking about the problem and I’m portraying people with the problem, so it makes it okay with me."

Then there’s Newman’s singing — as unmistakable as Dylan’s, and just as tempting to imitate. In David Wild’s press notes to the album, Newman talks about his singing having improved over the years. "You know," he tells me, "it’s the thing I’m least able to judge. That’s why I’ve always had a producer. I’ve often thought I can be hard on myself in every area — what an orchestra sounds like, what a guitar thing sounds like — but vocally sometimes I think I’m just fine — and I’m not." He laughs. "I don’t always know, but I think I sing better. But I have for a few albums. I might be starting to slip a little bit, actually."

What is it about his singing that he doesn’t like — phrasing? "I was always sort of okay to my mind with that. It’s really in terms of pitch and breathing. It suddenly dawned on me a couple of years ago that, Jesus, I should take a breath occasionally."

Randy Newman appears this Saturday, September 20, at Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston; call (617) 747-2261 or (617) 931-2000.