|
Harps & Angels | 
 enlarge
| Artist: Randy Newman
Label: Nonesuch
Category: Music
List Price: $18.98
Buy New: $9.27
You Save: $9.71 (51%)
New (53) Used (14) from $8.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 309
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.3
MPN: 122812
UPC: 075597998931
EAN: 0075597998931
Release Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new and factory shrinkwrapped. Not a remainder, CD-club copy, promo or cheap import. Official Nonesuch CD release, exactly as pictured and described. In stock. Buy from a trusted seller. Check our rating.
|
| Tracks:
| • | Harps and Angels | | • | Losing You | | • | Laugh and Be Happy | | • | A Few Words | | • | A Piece of the Pie | | • | Easy Street (3:14) | | • | Korean Parents | | • | Only a Girl | | • | Potholes | | • | Feels Like Home |
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Randy Newman's first studio album of all new material in nearly a decade is, by turns, hilarious, poignant and scathingly satirical. Harps and Angels often has an easy going Crescent City feel, with Newman on piano fronting a small combo and revealing, as Rolling Stone put it after the Carnegie Hall show, his serious love and study of the New Orleans piano tradition.
Album Description
Randy Newman's 2008 studio album titled Harps and Angels. Produced by Mitchell Froom and Lenny Waronker, it contains seven new songs and three updated versions of previously released songs.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 55 more reviews...
 A gem of an album : dark, cynical and very funny. August 5, 2008
59 out of 63 found this review helpful
Randy Newman is best known for writing songs for cute kids films like "Toy Story".
But don't knock it - the cash funds gems of albums like this. This is the real Newman - dark, cynical and very funny. "Harps & Angels" is only his third new album of non-movie music in 20 years as he's been busy scooping accolades for his Hollywood soundtrack work - but it's been worth the wait.
It's a winning mix of loping, Fats Domino-ish, New Orleans blues, topped off by Newman's sardonic slur.
The jazzy, bluesy instrumentation here is imbued with a blockbuster kind of magic. Newman is the man behind scores to "Toy Story" and "Monsters, Inc" after all.
Happily, he cuts through any cloying cutesiness with timely observational swipes - taking in such themes as 'terror', modern parenting and the economy, all delivered in his unmistakeably good-natured drawl.
The album consists of just 10 tracks, and has a running time that falls just short of 35 minutes, yet freights multitudes, musically and lyrically.
The title track is a gradually building, slowly sumptuous, New Orleans-flavoured jazz shimmy. Over this, Newman unspools the tale of a man sucking what he believes are his dying breaths on a pavement, only to be visited by an inexplicably Francophone celestial being who admits to the narrator that his time isn't up just yet - and, by way of atoning for the clerical error, offers some advice towards a better, more observant life.
"A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country" is the album's pivotal address: on this one, he's like a cross between Dr John and philosopher John Grey. A mid tempo bluesy country shuffle is the platform for a look at humanity's inhumanity and the decline of the American empire.
Randy's genius is to turn intelligent thought into simple words and complex, compelling, bitter-sweet American music.
Clearly, the early 21st century has provided rich fuel for Newman's self-styled American songbook.
Yet he's also capable of crafting a classy yet unreconstructed love song, as proved by the climactic melody "Feels Like Home".
It's sweetly sentimental enough to give you the warm'n'fuzzies - but this ol' teddy bear still has plenty of chutzpah and satirical bite.
"A Piece Of The Pie" makes you chuckle with swearing and jokes: he argues with a chorus of bellicose patriots and bickering Belgians, and pleads for deliverance by Jackson Browne. But the brilliantly sharp Weill-esque arrangement delivers a real sense of unease underneath all the knockabout. The world really is going to hell.
Newman is coming up to 65 now but he is not about to retire his lapel-grabbing melodies. Just when he begins to sound like a protest singer (even of the most elusive kind) he throws in a show tune such as "Laugh and Be Happy" or a conventional piece of Dixie jazz, in "Only a Girl.
The tracks that glide most assuredly into Newman's pantheon of classics are "Losing You", two minutes and 16 seconds of wonder, a deceptively simple, rueful, achingly beautiful ballad of bereavement that could equally have been written for Tom Waits or Frank Sinatra, and "Feels Like Home, beautifully crafted, precise and moving.
Both will have you in tears and both are among Newman's best songs.
"Feels like home" has been coverd by Bonnie Raitt on Michael: Music from the Motion Picture, by Linda Ronstadt on Feels Like Home, by Chantal Kreviazuk on What If It All Means Something, by Mario Frangoulis on Give US Your Poor, by Emmylou Harris on Trio II (Two) and by Soul diva Nita Whitaker on Life Stories.
By Newman's standards this is a good rather than great album.
But Newman's standards are very high. After all he's written some of the greatest popular songs of the past forty years.
There is much on "Harps & Angels" that will delight admirers of Newman's trademark sucker-punches, double-bluffs and irony-laden conceits.
Not for the first time, Newman is at his most affecting when he plays it mercilessly straight: his flickers of sincerity all the more beguiling for only appearing rarely.
My highlights : "A Few Words in Defence of Our Country", "A Piece of the Pie", "Losing You" and "Feels Like Home".
Have a great listening experience.
Compelling. A Grammy is in the cards ! August 5, 2008
55 out of 60 found this review helpful
Randy Newman has made a career out of being a very successful film composer (with 15 Oscar nominations and one win), who is best known these days for his "Pixar" soundtracks, including "Toy Story", "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters Inc".
But it is on his own albums, when he is not writing to order, that he really gets to let fly with as much comedic misanthropy as he can muster.
His last album, "Bad Love" was a brilliant black diamond of a record and his best for 30 years.
"Harps & Angels" finds him in a more mellow mood. But mellow is a relative term.
America, like all empires, has come to an end. This is the driving theme of "Harps & Angels", but Newman is a man of multitudes. He spits at US governance one minute ("A Few Words in Defence Of Our Country") and chokes up the next ("Feels Like Home').
The personal and political entwine lyrically with supreme cleverness, while New Orleans jazz, C&W, the Hollywood soundtrack are spitefully parodied. Classic Randy.
"Harps And Angels" is the first track and is about a man having a heart attack. The sound of harps and angels comes from God's backing singers as the judgment is delivered: "You ain't been a good man, you ain't been a bad man..."
Most of "Harps & Angels", like much of Newman's canon, is similar glorious, if bleak, whimsy.
His formidable backing band, comprising producer, time-served collaborator Mitchell Froom on keyboards, Attractions drummer Pete Thomas, virtuoso jazz bassist Greg Cohen, veteran session guitarist Steve Donnelly and pedal steel player Greg Leisz, conspire with a full-dress orchestra to confect country ballads, show tunes, Dixieland balladry, oriental pop and, on "Laugh And Be Happy", a groundbreaking enterprise in sarcastic Charleston. This has circulated in demo form before, and two other songs may also be familiar.
The closing cut, the gorgeous devotional "Feels Like Home" first appeared on 1995's "Faust", sung by Bonnie Raitt, and has since been covered by Emmylou Harris and Chantal Krevaziuk, among others. "A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country" was as an iTunes download - and New York Times op-ed - last year.
The lyrics of the latter made the op-ed page of the newspaper, but they work much better sung in Newman's lazy Noo Awlins croak - "the end of an empire is messy at best, this empire is ending like all the rest".
In "A Piece of The Pie", he hammers home his the-rich-get-richer theme with jagged, Kurt Weill-ish orchestration, while "Potholes" recommends creeping amnesia as a defence against painful memories. "Korean Parents", with its pseudo-Oriental flourishes, may be a misanthropic joke too far as Newman lampoons Asian families who bully their children to academic success, but he offers melodious balm with "Losing You" and the hymn-like closer, the aforementioned "Feels Like Home".
Fans of unfettered Newman have been waiting nine years for some new, non-cartoon material of this sort and will likely not be disappointed by this pithy ten-song collection, which indulges both his merciless wit and his softer, more sentimental side.
This album will only take up 36 minutes of your time. It'll make you laugh and cry.
After all, it's Randy Newman.
The fortuneteller says that a Grammy is...in the cards!
Toy Story (10th Anniversary Edition)
A Bug's Life (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Bad Love
Monsters, Inc. (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman
Faust (Dlx)
Randy's last Studio CD? August 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Harps and angels is another great randy newman CD, and no, I'm not one of randy's relatives. It took him 9 years to come up with 8 new songs, and reworked 2 more to make a complete album. That tells me this will probably be his last studio album. The 2 older tunes are 'laugh and be happy' which I love, and 'feels like home' originally on the faust CD. At first I didn't think feels like home fit into this collection, but it's still a nice song, though I like the faust version better. Another Gem is 'piece of the pie' A song that would have fit in nicely on the born again CD. Randy is a very funny cat, and alway's brings a smile to my face. Harp's and angels isn't randy's best, that belongs to good ol boys, sail away, little crimminals, 'bad love' is also one of his all time best, but this new one is pretty close to the top.
Instant Classic September 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This poignant, clever, brilliant album by a master of irony resonates with truth and beauty. Newman has always been one of my favorite artists (even though I'm not as big a fan of his film scores as his solo work) and this album ranks with his best. Welcome back, Randy. Long may you play. (To everyone: buy this--keep this artist in business.)
Social Commentary October 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Randy Newman is the most astute songwriter and thinker when it comes to social commentary. Not everyone "gets" him, but I crave his voice and his original songs. I have listened to this amazing album over and over, especially the song "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country." Truly, he has "heard America singing."
|
|
|
|
Powered by Search-Save.com
| |
