Posted by Jay Livingston
Randy Newman is 75 today.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was in a movie theater watching Toy Story 2. It may have been someone’s birthday party. I don’t remember. What I do remember is the song “When She Loved Me.”
As the song ended, I thought: here I am, a grown man surrounded by a bunch of eight-year olds, and I’m practically in tears because of a song that a cartoon toy doll just sang about a cartoon girl.
If this song does not win an Academy Award, I thought, there is no justice. It didn’t and there wasn’t. The Oscar went to Phil Collins.
The song has none of the irony that pervades Newman’s non-Pixar songs. In those songs, the voice we hear is a flawed characters an unreliable narrator, like the voice in his biggest hit “Short People.” (Some unimaginative listeners, unable to see the satire and irony, took Newman literally and condemned the song.)
The ambivalence haunts even Newman’s love songs, like “Marie,” which seems merely beautiful until you listen to the lyrics and realize that this guy is an abusive drunk, someone Marie would be better off without..
And I'm weak and I'm lazy
And I've hurt you so
And I don't listen to a word you say
When you're in trouble I just turn away
And yet, his feeling is real.
(I made similar observations in this 2008 blog post after seeing Newman in concert at Carnegie Hall.)
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