If you were to ask people to name the great popular songwriters of the last 50 years, I imagine you might get names like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Paul Simon. Fair enough. They’re all great songwriters.

But how many people would mention Randy Newman? Not many, and that’s a shame.

Randy Newman, who is 81 at this point, has kept a relatively low profile, but his impact on popular song has been profound.

I confess that it took me many years to realize that Randy Newman was the genius behind many songs I liked. When I was in high school, I was listening to Judy Collins’ album “In My Life”, which contained the Newman song “I think it’s going to rain today”. I didn’t know who wrote it, but it captured the aching loneliness I sometimes felt back then.  

When I was in college, I was attracted to the catchy tune of Newman’s “Sail Away”, but the name Randy Newman (if I even heard it) meant nothing to me. And initially, I didn’t recognize the subversive nature of a song written from the perspective of the captain of a slave ship trying to get Africans to come aboard.

A few years later, the Australian group 3 Dog Night recorded the weird and wonderful “Momma told me not to come” which I loved. I would later find out that Randy Newman wrote it.

It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I encountered the King’s Singers’ recording of “Short people” (a cheerful song from the point of view of a truly obnoxious bigot). At that point I finally discovered that these very diverse songs, each marvelous in a different way, were all products of Randy Newman’s wonderful (and sometimes warped) musical imagination.

Since then, Randy Newman has written many more excellent songs, some with broad appeal (like “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, written for Disney’s animated feature Toy Story) and some so politically incorrect as to be unplayable on the radio (like “Rednecks”, which pokes fun at both southerners and northerners).

Newman’s songs often need to be listened to more than once if you want to understand his message. Many of the songs are not as simple as they seem on the surface. (And Newman’s Louisiana drawl sometimes makes it hard to catch the words the first time around.)

When Newman writes in the first person, he is never actually writing about himself. He is impersonating a particular type of person and trying to see the world through their eyes. It isn’t always pretty. You can get the impression that he is making fun of these people, but that is generally not the case: in his songs, he sympathizes with even the most obnoxious characters, while he also seems to hold out hope for their redemption. Unlike most popular songwriters, Newman rarely writes love songs.

Newman is also a prolific composer of movie soundtracks (a profession shared with three of his uncles). He has also done a lot of orchestral arrangements, for movie soundtracks and to accompany his own singing. In many cases (for example, the movie “The Natural”) he has written the soundtrack and also conducted the orchestra.

I’m writing about Randy Newman right now because I just read the excellent new biography of him (“A few words in defense of our country: The biography of Randy Newman”, by Robert Hilburn). Reading the book took me back to a lot of his songs that I have enjoyed over the years.  

I came to realize that there are few, if any, better songwriters of his generation; and certainly, there are no others as musically versatile.

Newman has been suffering health problems the last few years. He has stopped touring, and he has almost stopped his songwriting. I fear he may not be with us much longer, but in our current political situation we need him more than ever. I hope he sticks around long enough to leave us with some music that will get us through the difficult period we find ourselves in.