On this date in 1943, singer-songwriter Randall Stuart Newman was born in Los Angeles to nonobservant Jewish parents Irving and Adele (Fox) Newman. Growing up in New Orleans, Newman was greatly influenced by the music he heard as a child. He began playing piano at age 7. His uncles wrote film scores for a living and one, Al Newman, wrote the now-famous 20th Century Fox fanfare.
At age 17 he started work as a songwriter for a publishing company and released his first single in 1962. He studied music at UCLA but dropped out with just one semester left. His first album, ”Randy Newman” (1968), was critically acclaimed. In 1972 his songs “Sail Away” and “You Can Leave Your Hat On” gained him further recognition. Newman’s first major pop hit, “Short People” (1977), reached number two on the Billboard charts. His song “I Love L.A.” (1983), can be frequently heard at L.A. sports events.
Newman has released 12 studio albums, most recently “Dark Matter” in 2017. Since the 1980s he has worked mostly as a film composer and has scored nine Disney-Pixar animated films. He has won three Emmys and seven Grammy Awards and has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Newman’s instantly recognizable voice came to be associated primarily with his acerbic, irreverent themes and lyrics on politics and religion. His song “Old Man” demonstrate lessons he learned from his father: “Don’t need no god to comfort you, you taught me not to believe that lie.” During a hospital visit, his father pointed at the patients and said, “That’s God’s will over there and that’s God’s will over there and that’s God’s will over there …”
AllMusic critic Mark Deming called “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind),” albeit quietly sung in a slow tempo, “one of the most bitter rants against religion that anyone committed to vinyl prior to the punk era.”
He was married to German-born Roswitha Schmale from 1967 to 1985 and they had three sons. In 1990 he married Gretchen Preece. They had two children.
