Randy Newman - Little Criminals CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

to put across his situational ironies, gnomic narratives and skewed moral tales; in fact, this time around, the ironies, morals and narratives seem too slight to elicit conviction. Newman can't put all of himself into a song as vague as "I'll Be Home" or as pallid as "In Germany before the War," because the songs contain so little of him. One can go back over Newman's work and find any number of tunes that cry out to be heard, whether or not very many people actually did hear them; there isn't a song on Little Criminals that sounds as if it needed to be sung. Newman has always been ambivalent about his ambitions, aesthetic as well as commercial, but this is the first time his ambivalence has gotten the better of him.

What Little Criminals showcases are not songs, but arrangements, plus the contributions of various members of the Eagles. The arrangements are good—particularly with "Jolly Coppers" and "Baltimore," not to mention the dreamy bandbox sound on "Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America"—but they're good in limbo; the music fails to bring out Newman's lyrics and his singing, because both are so limited. "Baltimore" is clearly meant as a statement about The Death of an American City, but there isn't a detail in it that has anything to do with Baltimore. Where is Newman's eye for the specific, the eye that picked out the little fat man next to Calvin Coolidge in "Louisianna 1927"?

Some of the new songs never rise above the level of the tame joke, but "Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America" aims halfheartedly at serious satire. The song was meant for the soundtrack of Robert Altman's now-shelved movie version of Ragtime; the worst that can be said of it is that it fully matches the cheap sarcasm of E.L. Doctorow's book, and the best that can be said of it is that there is a touching beauty to the way Randy sings the opening lines: "The world of science is my game/And Albert Einstein is my name." The problem is that Newman is no longer taking on the personae of his characters, and so, beyond that first turn of phrase, "Freud" and "Einstein" evaporate. Newman simply has nothing to say—except that America is not all it's cracked up to be, a notion unlikely