It’s time for another installment of the Decades series, which will eventually have me covering notable albums from every year between 1970 and 2009. Forty years, somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 albums. Wow.
I’ve made it through the first seven years of each decade so far. Twenty-eight years down, 12 to go. Over the next several weeks I’ll be covering the year 1977, first counting down my 10 favorites before covering albums that are new to me.
Our next 2013 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is one of my personal musical heroes, Mr. Randy Newman. Newman first became eligible for the Hall in 1988 and was first nominated in 2005. He didn’t make the cut that year but had better luck the second time he made the ballot.
Newman reacted to the news with his usual dry sense of humor, saying “I really thought maybe I’d have to die first. I didn’t think it would happen if it didn’t happen, you know, a little earlier. But this is great. I’m really glad it happened when I was still around to see it.”
Here’s a track from Randy Newman’s most recent album, 2017’s Dark Matter. The fact that this is the first time a song from the album has appeared on the blog since its release says a lot.
Newman is notoriously slow when it comes to releasing new albums (in part because he spends a lot of time on movie scores). Dark Matter was only his fifth studio album release in the more than four decades following a rather prolific run in the 70s.
Randy Newman has written a lot of songs for a lot of Disney movies. He’s received eight Academy Award nominations for his Disney songs alone, winning twice (for ‘If I Didn’t Have You’ from Monsters Inc. and ‘We Belong Together’ from Toy Story 3).
All of that work is excellent, but for my money the best Randy Newman soundtrack for a Disney film belongs to 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. That’s because the content is a perfect match for Newman’s New Orleans jazz-influenced style.
‘Rider in the Rain’ is a lovely little country and western ditty by Randy Newman, included on his 1977 album Little Criminals. If you think this song sounds like a long lost Eagles track, that’s because Don Henley, Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther provide backing vocals.
Interviewed about Little Criminals at the time, Newman had this to say about today’s SOTD: “There’s also one about me as a cowboy called ‘Rider in the Rain’. I think it’s ridiculous. The Eagles are on there. That’s what’s good about it.”
Meet Me In Montauk 