“Marie” is one of the lesser-known songs that Randy Newman chose to play Wednesday in the first of two sold-out concerts at City Winery, but it left a bruise all the same.
It’s ostensibly a song about the narrator’s undying devotion to the title character, but it’s cut with self-loathing. It’s a love song that leaves a bitter aftertaste, and the relatively muted response from the Newman devotees in the audience was as uneasy as the song. It’s a song designed to induce conflicted emotions, and in leaving that tension unresolved, it did its job almost too well.
Newman is one of the best songwriters of the last half-century, but he doesn’t have the multimillion-selling singles to prove it. “That’s it for the hits part of the evening,” he cracked after dispatching “Short People,” his sole top-40 song, early in the set. At one time, I used to think that the song’s bridge amounted to a maudlin apology for the song’s biliously hilarious send-up of bigotry, but at City Winery, it felt more like a set-up, allowing Newman to return to his ugly putdowns with renewed fervor. Even at his most accessible, Newman rarely lets his listeners off easy. His songs are designed to cause trouble, to haunt or to induce a rueful laugh, or oftentimes both.
Though he’s not regarded as a protest singer, Newman and his songs couldn’t help but speak to the times. There were a few snips at the ego known as “Putin,” and the great flood depicted in the weary “Louisiana 1927” still hadn’t let up. Nor had the casual imperialist impulses bandied about over Irish Whiskey in “Brothers” or the immigration blues of “Laugh and Be Happy.”
In many of the songs, Newman skewered political power plays with deadpan sarcasm that suited his drawl. Over concise bursts of blues, shuffles and New Orleans syncopations on grand piano, Newman occasionally struggled to nail some high notes and fumbled a solo early in the set — which he mercilessly mocked. But he was a master of orchestrating mood and playing a range of flawed characters, depicted in mini aural movies compressed into three verses and three minutes.
He managed to sound 15 years older on some of the ballads, as if the weight of his narrators’ failings were about to crush them, or like a snarky kid on sharp-tongued critiques of the self-important. He took special joy in deriding himself and the rest of the “old, thick, gray-haired people clogging the stages of America” in “I’m Dead (But Don’t Know It).” For this song and the equally unsparing “Shame,” he let the audience join in on the derision as the backing choir.
He lightened the load with a couple of songs from his Hollywood soundtrack career: “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” and “I Love to See You Smile.” These were necessary respites from heavyweight shots of history and metaphysics: “Sail Away” and the way it makes a slave trader sound like the ultimate con man, conjuring a wistful picture of far-off paradise; “The Great Nations of Europe” and its warning to all humankind throughout history: “Hide your wives and daughters/Hide the groceries too.” And then there was “God’s Song,” in which the deity views his creation as delusional fools. It was humor of the darkest shade, but in Newman’s Vonnegut world, it was also necessity.
Yet the singer also made the case, if more subtly, for the empathy that underpins some of his finest songs. In introducing “Wandering Boy,” he told a joke, but then unraveled it. The song found a father yearning for some small assurance that his prodigal son was OK, but finding none. It was paired with the equally wrenching “Real Emotional Girl,” in which “Daddy’s little girl” becomes a loner who “lives down deep inside herself.” It was enough to melt the harshest cynic.
Randy Newman set list Wednesday at City Winery:
1. It’s Money That I Love
2. Mama Told Me Not to Come
3. Bad News From Home
4. Jolly Coppers on Parade
5. She Chose Me
6. Short People
7. It’s a Jungle Out There
8. Marie
9. You’ve Got a Friend in Me
10. Birmingham
11. Wandering Boy
12. Real Emotional Girl
13. You Can Leave Your Hat On
14. I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It)
15. Guilty
16. Putin
17. Political Science
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Second set
18. Baltimore
19. Laugh and Be Happy
20. Germany Before the War
21. Rollin’
22. The World Isn’t Fair
23. The Great Nations of Europe
24. Losing You
25. Dixie Flyer
26. Louisiana 1927
27. Brothers
28. I Love to See You Smile
29. Sail Away
30. Shame
31. God’s Song
32. Feels Like Home
Encore
33. It’s Lonely at the Top
34. I Think It’s Going to Rain Today
Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @gregkot
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