I’m finishing up my second week of Randy Newman songs with another selection from his most recent album, 2008’s Harps and Angels. Last week I featured ‘Losing You,’ a very touching song about being unable to forget.
‘Potholes’ is that song’s opposite — a very funny song about being unable to remember.
Newman hasn’t written much about himself over the decades his career has spanned. He is more comfortable putting himself in the shoes of an often unlikable narrator. Even the songs that seem to be about him are really twisted versions of his reality.
But on Harps and Angels, he seems to have turned his attention inward for a change. ‘Potholes’ feels completely autobiographical to me. The hilarious story that ends the song, about his father embarrassing him in front of his second wife, is too priceless in its details to be anything but true.
Have all my life
I love my dear mother
And I love my wife – God bless her
I even love my teenage daughter
There’s no accounting for it
Apparently I don’t care how I’m treated
My love is unconditional or something
I’ve been hurt a time or two
I ain’t gonna lie
I have my doubts sometimes
About the ethics of the so-called fairer sex
Fair about what?
But I find time goes by
And one forgives as one forgets
And one does forget
God bless the potholes
Down on memory lane
God bless the potholes
Down on memory lane
Everything that happens to me now
Is consigned to oblivion by my brain
I remember my father
My brother of course
I remember my mother
I spoke of her earlier and I remember that
I remember the smell of cut grass
And going off to play ball in the morning
Funny story about that
Now I used to pitch
I could get the ball over the plate
But anyway, this one time
I must have thrown a football around or something the day before
I walked about fourteen kids in a row
Cried
Walked off the mound
Handed the ball to the third baseman
And just left the field
Anyway, many years later
I brought the woman who was to become my second wife – God bless her
To meet my father for the first time
They exchanged pleasantries
I left the room for a moment
It was the first time he had met her you understand
When I came back
He was telling her the story
Right off the bat
About how I had walked fourteen kids
Cried and left the mound
Next time he met her he told her the same goddamn story!
God bless the potholes
Down on memory lane
God bless the potholes
Down on memory lane
I hope some real big ones open up
And take some of the memories that do remain
Meet Me In Montauk 
Somehow I feel that, even after two weeks, we’ve only scratched the surface on Newman. Love this song as well:) Not sure if the stories are true, but they do sound authentic.
I’m with Dana…. can’t we exchange Ron Sexsmith weekends for Randy Newman weekends?! PLEASE!! 🙂
Listening to these last couple of songs, as I catch up on the second RN week, I realize that he is an artist with whom Lyle and I might consider sharing our desert island. Which makes perfect sense, of course, since Lyle has already shared a stage with him.
Yes, I feel relatively certain that I would never tire of Randy Newman. Like Lovett, he has the uncanny ability to make me smile, chuckle, guffaw… choke up, tear up, cry… from song to song, and no matter how many times I’ve heard that particular song. That is a gift, and I know it says more about the connection between artist and fan than it does about the artist alone. Still, it’s quite extraordinary.
Potholes? What a simple, strange, interesting metaphor. If I were trying to design a metaphor to convey lost memories, I think I’d come up with detours, dead ends, closed roads… not potholes… but by the end of the song, it’s clear that potholes are the perfect metaphor, as the memories can’t really be avoided. You might think you have forgotten them (perhaps you even have), but there they are in the middle of the road just waiting for your wheels to slip, because somebody out there is likely to have shared that memory with you. Maybe you’ll manage to avoid it, or maybe it will show up, late at night, when you least expect it, and jar you from your peaceful drive….
More Randy Newman, please 🙂
Politeness is not just for strangers.