The Devil and Mr. Newman

"I never thought they were like novelty songs," Newman allows. "I mean, I just thought 'Short People' was about someone who was crazy in a very peculiar way. It's an odd mania. There's hardly some kind of short-people oppression going on, but I like to make people laugh, and it's another thing that isn't done much with the [songwriting] form. It's taken very seriously, and so I've written more comedy songs than any other pop writer that I can think of. So I guess it's like novelty songs."

Even when singing in the first person, Newman writes simple and powerful character studies -- the down-and-out Southerners who populate Good Old Boys, the slave-ship captain of "Sail Away," the kid who promised to take care of "Davy the Fat Boy" and then sells him into the freak show. He has been Sigmund Freud mocking Albert Einstein's love for America, the poor man watching his land destroyed by flood and the rich man laughing at the homeless, the Jew who wants to be a gentile and the white man who wants to be black, the impotent Devil and the spiteful God.

But Newman's greatest talent lies in his ability to subvert, even pervert, the songwriting form -- to write around a subject without becoming abstract, to make his point without preaching or becoming condescending. He will write a love song but never stoop to sentimentality (in the haunting "Marie," from Good Old Boys, the narrator professes his love only when he's drunk). And he will write an antiwar song during the height of Vietnam but still make you laugh ("Boom goes London and boom Paree/More room for you and more room for me," he sings on "Political Science").

"I guess I don't think songs are such a great medium for directness," Newman says. "I'm happier with the indirection of it. What are you going to say A'War's bad?' Yeah, sure it is, but I'd rather do 'Political Science.' What do you say -- 'Don't be an asshole and act like a rich fool?' Or do you do a song like 'My Life Is Good?' I think I like 'My Life Is Good' better than that. I think I'm setting up straw men and knocking them down left and right.

"Of all the things I do, like soundtracks or write one of these concept things, probably the most individual thing about me and the thing that makes it different -- the reason to do anything -- is the songs I write are strange. I mean, they're different from most people's, and if I do any kind of work at all after this, I should be doing that -- writing strange songs.