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Randy Newman, Music’s Most Biting Storyteller, Gets His Own Story Told: Ex-L.A. Times Critic Robert Hilburn on Penning the Singer-Composer’s Biography
Randy.
Since leaving his post as the nation’s most well-known rock critic, a job he held down at the Los Angeles Times from the late ’60s through 2005, Hilburn has written four books, including the ultimate biographies of Paul Simon and, before that, Johnny Cash. Hilburn gets into the impact of growing up under the shadow of three famous film-composer uncles (Alfred, Lionel and Emil), being steered away from classical and driven into pop music by his childhood friend Lenny Waronker(who went on to guide his career at Reprise Records), and how a turn into film scoring fulfilled his family destiny. I wanted him to be as complex as he could be without having the reader say, “Well, I can’t understand that,” but enough to have them say, “Well, it is pretty serious what he’s doing.” And then I really spent a lot of time with John Lasseter, and “Toy Story” was interesting to me, because of how it related to Randy starting to write music when he was around 5, while he’s watching cartoons.
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