Рэнди Ньюман выпустил новый альбом «Темная материя», сохраняя ироничный взгляд на американскую действительность

I can think of no songwriter as fruitfully unhappy as Randy Newman. Not angsty—there are angstier—and not depressed in the poetic, European sense, but unhappy: that cow-eyed state in which the good stuff doesn’t feel that good and the bad stuff you just learn to laugh at. For 50 years he has delivered us obliquely sentimental, trend-free music about racists, losers, lovelorn deadbeats (“Marie”) and children who tell their parents to come visit anytime—but do call first (“So Long Dad”). His jingoists dream of liberation through atomic war (“Political Science”) and his wife-beaters complain of having to sit down when they pee (“Shame”). His is a world in which it sucks to be at the bottom and sucks to be at the top but at least the people at the top are rich (“The World Isn’t Fair”). Did I mention most of these songs feature an orchestra? Randy Newman can get an orchestra to pull tears from you like a pickpocket. His sleight-of-hand is to bring out a monster and make you see the human underneath. He makes the better part of his living writing music for Pixar movies, and has been awarded several Grammys for the work. Newman’s new album is called Dark Matter, a phrase intended both in the scientific sense and the figurative one—“it’s a dark matter.” He has lost little of his bite and none of his humor. Comfortably into his 70s, with what many would call a very successful career behind him and still time ahead, he seems less interested in polemics than before, less interested in leveraging sentiment with disgust, giving over—ever so slightly—to a softer intention. No score yet, be the first to add. Take “On the Beach,” a breezy piece of café jazz about a guy named Willie who just…never left the beach. Willie isn’t out to screw anyone and yet—like all Newman’s American losers—he will invariably screw himself. Decades on, he’s still talking about the advent of the Hobie Cat the way some boomers talk about the Beatles—harmless, lost, reconciled to a past that isn’t coming back to pick him up anytime soon. Elsewhere, set to a piece of high-striding brass-band music, “Sonny Boy” tells the true story of Sonny Boy Williamson, a blues singer who travels north only to find another blues singer making a living under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. Sonny Boy II ended up touring Europe and became royalty for white blues-rock bands like the Yardbirds and the Animals. Sonny Boy I was stabbed in the head with an icepick during a robbery in Chicago; his last words were reportedly “lord have mercy.” In Newman’s version, the lord does in fact have mercy, and Williamson becomes the first and ever blues singer to enter heaven, a mixed blessing that makes him feel lucky, lonely, and lame all at the same time. Smart but never intellectual, given more to the words we use over the words we know, Newman peppers these stories with little references to the Great Migration, climate change (the swells on Willie’s beach keep getting bigger), global politics, and American myth. Another song, “Brothers,” uses an imagined conversation between a worried John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert about the Bay of Pigs invasion as a pretext for John confessing his love for the music of Cuban singer Celia Cruz. Newman, whose songs have been successfully covered by walking moose knuckles like Tom Jones and Joe Cocker, continues to sing like a great writer. Does it even need to be said that the people who love him really love him and the people who don’t just think he’s weird?