Bad Mood Rising

Randy Newman limps across the blue carpeting of his home studio, past the grand piano and a window looking onto a stream running through his back yard, and pauses at a cluttered countertop, his eyes settling on a piece of sheet music. "This is a song I had to write for a goddamn alligator," Newman says.

In the early Seventies, Newman released three of the darkest, wittiest albums of the decade: 12 Songs, Sail Away and Good Old Boys, featuring unreliably narrated songs about rednecks, slave traders, circus freaks, floods, dying fathers, stripping girlfriends, Huey Long and (in the role of villain) God. Over the past 13 years, though, the 64-year-old has reached the widest audience of his career by writing songs for Pixar movies like Cars, Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story. The alligator song is for an upcoming Disney film called The Princess and the Frog. "They showed me a clip," Newman says. "It's set in New Orleans in the Twenties. It was a scene in a restaurant with white people and black people all sitting together, laughing. I said, 'Oh, you're making a science-fiction movie?' The studio people said, 'Ha ha . . . uh, what do you mean?' " Newman shakes his head at the stupidity of the world — so consistently his attitude that you could caption pretty much every picture ever taken of him that way. But in 2006, the historic stupidity of the current administration prompted Newman to write a new song for adults, "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country," in which he offers a funny, backhanded defense of the Bush-Cheney regime by pointing out they're not as bad as Hitler, Stalin, the Caesars or King Leopold of Belgium. Last year, Newman released the song as a low-resolution YouTube video, just him at the piano, shot in a single frame. The Internet responded with love, and Newman had his first unaffiliated-with-an-animated-motion-picture hit since the goofy "I Love L.A." went into heavy rotation on MTV in 1983.

"A Few Words" is featured on the just-released Harps and Angels, Newman's first album of new material in nine years. In the opening words of the opening song — the title track — he slyly sings, "Hasn't anybody seen me lately/I'll tell you why," over a bluesy piano roll. The song goes on to detail a near-death experience in which the narrator has a Technicolor vision of heaven, Newman all the while singing the way he speaks, in a nasal drawl redolent of the bayou. (Newman spent time as a child visiting his mother's family in New Orleans.) Elsewhere, "Losing You" and "Feels Like Home" are gorgeous, straight ballads, while "Potholes" is a hilarious, meandering story-song that looks at the bright side of age-related memory loss.