Randy Newman

Randy Newman has spent decades as one of pop's most sardonic storytellers, and 2017's Dark Matter showed the old master hadn't lost his bite. Born in Los Angeles in 1943 into a family of Hollywood film composers, he writes Americana-flavored songs sung in a lazy Southern drawl and told by narrators you would be foolish to trust. The joke is always sharper than it looks.

He started out in the early 1960s writing background music for television and handing UK hits to Cilla Black, Gene Pitney and the Alan Price Set, then joined the creative crowd at Warner Bros. Records, which put out his debut, Randy Newman, in 1968. Other singers scored with his "Mama Told Me Not to Come" and "You Can Leave Your Hat On", but his own records are where the mordant wit lives: Sail Away and its "Political Science", Good Old Boys and "Louisiana 1927", Trouble in Paradise and the sunny, ambivalent "I Love L.A.", and he even landed a hit of his own with "Short People".

Since the 1990s he has mostly been scoring films, most famously for Disney and Pixar, from Toy Story to Monsters, Inc. and Cars, and "You've Got a Friend in Me" gave him another hit. That work has brought him two Academy Awards from 22 nominations, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 2013. Dark Matter, with "She Chose Me", proved the songwriter was still in there.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.