This year's Oscar music categories are full of nominees who've had wildly varied careers, among them Trent Reznor's journey from Nine Inch Nails to "The Social Network," A. R. Rahman's trip from Bollywood to Hollywood. But few have carried on simultaneous (and schizophrenic) careers quite the way Randy Newman has: the multiple Oscar nominee writes orchestral film scores and mainstream pop songs for movies, while at the same time continuing his solo career crafting dark, wickedly satiric songs and classic albums like "Sail Away" and "Good Old Boys."
The first time I spoke to Newman, I was working at Rolling Stone and he'd just written his first film score, for Milos Forman's "Ragtime." (It'd get him his first Oscar nomination, too.) Almost 30 years later he's in the running for the 20th time for the song "We Belong Together" from "Toy Story 3." Newman himself is as blunt, honest and funny as ever – but a warning: his deadpan humor doesn't always come across in print. When in doubt, it's best to assume that he's kidding, more or less.
(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
With 20 nominations but only one win, do you try to avoid getting caught up in the race?
I never fail to enjoy getting nominated. Beyond that I've pretty much given up on it, although this year I'm kind of getting sucked into it. Usually, you pretty much know that something else is going to win. This time, I guess I could win. I don't know. They might want to give the picture something more than just Best Animated Feature, and wanting to honor Pixar might somehow bestow it on me. (laughs) It wouldn’t be a mistake.
What was your assignment with the song?
To write a song that indicated that they had decided that their lives – the toys' lives and the lives of everyone in the picture – were meant to be connected to each other. That they belonged together. I don’t know whether they said the title specifically, but that's very much the message I got. So that's what I did.
I wrote it as a duet, and I figured they'd get, you know, John Mayer and Katy Perry to do it. Make it a young people duet of some kind. But they didn’t want to do that. They wanted the same voice they had in the other "Toy Story" movies, they wanted some consistency. (laughs) It was like I was being more of a hack than they were. So they saved me from my own instincts.
Did the song come easily?
Relatively. If I have the information, it often comes fairly quickly. But it was a little complicated doing the record itself. It's an odd kind of rock thing that's hard to play, and I had to get stuntman pianists for part of it. And when they told me it was just supposed to be me, I had to monkey around a bit with it.
