Bad Mood Rising

It's a welcome return to form for Newman, one of the greatest songwriters of the rock era — though his songs rarely rock and often have more in common with Tin Pan Alley and show tunes. In conversation at his Pacific Palisades home, which he shares with his second wife, Gretchen, and their two teenage children, Newman sips a Diet Coke and seems perpetually bemused by his life and the state of the world.

"A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" feels like a different kind of Randy Newman song to me. It has a similar humor, but . . .

Yeah, it's a different sort of narrator.

Right. It feels less like a narrator and more like something coming from you.

It does, yeah. I've always thought it was too easy just to say, "War is bad." Or, "The Bush administration is bad." I mean, yeah. . . . Well, you can't even say, "Of course it is," because there's people that don't think so. I played this song in Meridian, Mississippi, and they laugh, all right, but they go "oooh" at the "worst administration" line. They don't think it is the worst. That's the way it goes. It's a free country.

I found an early quote from you —

That's the problem.

— from an interview in the mid-Seventies, where you said other than your songs about race —

Did a lot of 'em.