Randy Newman | Biography, Songs, Scores, & Facts | Britannica (2024)

Randy Newman (born November 28, 1943, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American composer, songwriter, singer, and pianist whose character-driven, ironic, and often humorous compositions won him a cult audience and praise from critics but were atypical of the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s that gave him his start as a performer.

Born in Los Angeles but taken to New Orleans as an infant, Newman was still a young boy when his family returned to Los Angeles, where his uncle Emil Newman was a conductor and his uncles Lionel and Alfred Newman composed scores for motion pictures. He studied musical composition at the University of California at Los Angeles and worked as a staff songwriter for a publishing company.

His first releases as a performer, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sold poorly but prompted cover versions by artists such as Three Dog Night (who topped the charts with “Mama Told Me Not to Come”) and Harry Nilsson. Bringing his love for the New Orleans piano-oriented rhythm and blues of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair to the pop music tradition of George Gershwin, Newman released Sail Away (1972) and Good Old Boys (1974), with sardonic songs whose underlying humaneness and sense of social justice were often misinterpreted by listeners but much praised by critics. The tongue-in-cheek quality of Newman’s biggest hits, “Short People” from Little Criminals (1977) and “I Love L.A.” from Trouble in Paradise (1983), was lost on many listeners. Land of Dreams (1988) was Newman’s most personal album; in 1995 he released Faust, a concept album based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. The boxed set Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman appeared in 1998 and was followed by Bad Love (1999), his first album of new songs in 11 years. It would be nearly another decade before he released Harps and Angels (2008). Dark Matter (2017) earned him, in addition to his usual stellar reviews, a Grammy Award for instrumental and vocal arrangment on the song “Putin.”

Newman had a successful parallel career as the composer of scores and songs for motion pictures, most notably for Ragtime (1981) and The Natural (1984); he earned his first Grammy for his sound track for the latter film. In 1995 he began a fruitful collaboration with Pixar Animation Studios, and he received two Academy Award nominations for his work on Toy Story (1995). He received three more Grammys for the Pixar films A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Monsters, Inc. (2001) before his Academy Award drought came to an end. After 16 nominations, he won his first Oscar in 2002 for “If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc. Newman’s Pixar sound tracks continued to bear fruit, as he won a Grammy for the song “Our Town” from Cars (2006) and another for the instrumental score for Toy Story 3 (2010) and a second Oscar, for the song “We Belong Together” from the latter film. He also scored Cars 3 (2017) and Toy Story 4 (2019). His song (“I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away”) for the latter film and his score for the drama Marriage Story (2019) earned Newman his 21st and 22nd Oscar nominations in 2020.

In 2013 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.