Randy Newman Childhood — New Orleans and Los Angeles

Randy Newman was born in Los Angeles in 1943 but spent part of his childhood in New Orleans, where his uncles Alfred, Lionel, and Emil Newman — all major Hollywood composers — gave him an early immersion in professional music. He returned to Los Angeles and grew up in the Brentwood neighbourhood, which became the source of one of his characteristic tensions: the privileged, ironic Westside LA perspective that allowed him to write about American darkness with detachment and dark comedy. His unreliable narrators — racists, drunks, imperialists, God himself — say things the songs simultaneously endorse and condemn.

Newman's catalogue is singular in American pop: 'Short People,' 'Political Science,' 'Sail Away' (a slave trader's recruitment pitch that is one of the most disturbing songs ever written in the key of C major), 'Louisiana 1927,' 'I Love LA,' and 'You've Got a Friend in Me.' His three-decade parallel career scoring films for Pixar and others has made him ubiquitous in a completely different register. He has won multiple Academy Awards for film scores while remaining an acquired taste as a recording artist — exactly as he would prefer.

Newman has lived in Los Angeles his entire adult life and the city's specific geography — its freeways, its ethnic neighbourhoods, its self-mythology — runs through his work. Brentwood, where he grew up, is an affluent Westside neighbourhood. He has no formal landmark in either New Orleans or Los Angeles, but his connection to both cities is deep and musically productive.