While touring in support of his 2008 album Harps and Angels, Randy Newman performed a special concert at London's intimate LSO St. Luke's, an 18th-century Anglican church that has been restored by the London Symphony Orchestra for use in its community and music education programs. He was accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Robert Ziegler, and the program was televised by the BBC. Nonesuch Records now releases this concert as Randy Newman: Live in London.

The 22-song London set features songs from throughout Newman's four-decade long career, including some of his best-known songs like "Short People," "Louisiana 1927," and "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," as well as newer songs such as "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" and "Laugh and Be Happy." An interview from the BBC broadcast also is included on the DVD.

The songwriting genius' multi-label highlights on one CD! The first of its kind, this unique collection gathers 21 tracks released between 1968 and 1999, including Newman's greatest hits, album cuts, and soundtrack classics.

On The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 2, the second in a proposed three-volume retrospective, the singer and songwriter offers another engrossing solo set, just piano and voice, that swings between the hilarious and the heartbreaking, sometimes brilliantly encompassing both. Longtime collaborators Mitchell Froom and Lenny Waronker, who were also behind the boards for Newman's acclaimed 2008 Nonesuch disc Harps and Angels, co-produced. These 16 tunes, drawn from a catalog that now spans four decades, are not normal indeed. "Cowboys" first appeared on his stunningly mature 1968 debut, Randy Newman, while the grimly amusing "Laugh and Be Happy" and the bittersweet "Losing You" are taken from Harps and Angels.

During the 1970s, singer/songwriter Randy Newman distinguished himself by dodging the prevailing confessional trend that was de rigueur for his peers, preferring to build his songs around richly detailed, often grotesque characters, and taking his story lines from anyone's history but his own. By the late '80s, however, his parallel ambitions as a film composer now yielding a separate, equally distinctive body of work, Newman was relaxed enough to allow introspection: 1988's Land of Dreams spins Newman's childhood sojourn in wartime New Orleans into the wonderful, opening title song and the farcical "New Orleans Wins the War," relives grade school traumas ("Four Eyes"), and offers a bleak portrait of a marriage unraveling on the quietly devastating "Bad News from Home." These songs, and two atypically tender love songs, "Something Special" and "Falling In Love," are as close to autobiography as he's ever gotten. --Sam Sutherland

Randy Newman's first studio album of all new material in nearly a decade is, by turns, hilarious, poignant and scathingly satirical. Harps and Angels often has an easy going Crescent City feel, with Newman on piano fronting a small combo and revealing, as Rolling Stone put it after the Carnegie Hall show, his serious love and study of the New Orleans piano tradition.

No Description Available.
Genre: Popular Music
Media Format: Compact Disk
Rating:
Release Date: 30-SEP-2003

UK-only five CD collection containing a quintet of albums from the acclaimed singer/songwriter housed in mini-LP sleeves. Includes the albums Randy Newman (1968), 12 Songs (1970), Sail Away (1972), Good Old Boys (1974) and Little Criminals (1977). Rhino 2011.