Why Randy Newman preferred Prince to “almost anyone else”
Every musician will have their preferences when they aren’t creating music on the fly. As much as George Harrison may have been able to open up people’s minds to the possibilities of other genres of music, his personal listening didn’t really stray all that far from his early favourites like Bob Dylan, Ravi Shankar and Carl Perkins. While Randy Newman could have easily relied on his favourite jazz recordings to carry him through his career, he said that Prince was among the most interesting artists he had ever seen.
But have you seen the pedigree of each of these artists? ‘The Purple One’ has been known for making some of the biggest blockbuster music to come out of the 1980s, and Newman is one of the great singer-songwriters of his generation that most people under the age of 40 probably know better for being the guy who wrote the music for Toy Story and Monsters Inc.
Those don’t really lend themselves to being cut from the same cloth, but it didn’t matter to Newman. He was a musician looking to break down the essence of every song he listened to, and Prince had been toying with what a song could sound like since before he was even out of his teens.
For You may have been a perfectly decent debut record, but Prince would go far beyond just the ‘Minneapolis’ sound. By the time he got to working on albums like Sign o’ the Times, it looked like his genre changed every few minutes, finding time to go from psychedelic power pop to soulful masterpieces on a dime.
For the uninitiated, that probably sounds exhausting (which it sort of is), but for those who’ve been around the block, this was wildly exciting. There hadn’t been someone who made this many genre shifts before or since, and Newman was glad to see a genius working his magic in real time.
Speaking with David Sheff, Newman thought that Prince was a cut above anyone else working during the 1980s, stating, “I admire Prince. Even if it’s babyish sex stuff, he’s saying something. I prefer him to Springsteen–to almost anybody else, in fact. He tries new things. He’s brave. He takes chances that people won’t like him in the music and the lyrics. I don’t even know if he knows what he’s doing harmonically, but the stuff interests me a lot more than anyone else’s music at this moment”.
Let’s all remember that this isn’t like Quincy Jones or Paul McCartney or anything. This is Randy Newman, the guy with the self-described “wounded water buffalo” voice who made songs that were indebted to the sounds of New Orleans jazz. It’s wild that he would even consider listening to something like ‘Darling Nikki’ in his spare time, but maybe he saw what everyone else didn’t.
Beyond his knack for pop songs, Prince was a creative dynamo for making jazz music. Whether he was carrying the entire song on an acoustic guitar on The Truth or jamming for the hell of it on The Rainbow Children, he had some of the best chops in the business, usually looking to find that lost chord that everyone had forgotten about half the time. Newman could have made songs that had sharp comments on society, but what he did with his sharp tongue, Prince could do with just a few seconds with a guitar.