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Dark Matter, Randy Newman’s first new album of the 2010s, is his wildest and wooliest yet. That is, if you don’t count his 1979 album Born Again – where Newman threatened public indecency, tormented the Electric Light Orchestra, and sang as a homophobe who suddenly realizes he’s gay as he’s about to commit assault and battery. But Dark Matter stands out in Newman’s discography for more than shock value or, um, questionable synthesizers. It’s his first album in which he challenges himself to not sing as one character – but often two or three simultaneously. How about an arena full of them?
The opening track, “The Great Debate,” attempts no less than solving all of the big questions about evolution, faith, global warming and the rest in eight minutes. Its characters – less inhabiting a song than a Prairie Home Companion-style variety show – mostly fly off the rails as they pontificate and squabble. And Newman can’t resist the little digs on both sides – “We’ve got the Shakers, the Quakers, the anti-inoculators!” “We’ve got some of the most expensive scientists in the world / Eminent scientists, that is.”
From this smashing start, Matter would seem to be preoccupied with put-ons, caveats and twists. More than on any other Newman record, its songs feel like double-sided coins, giving credence to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to keep two opposed ideas in mind at the same time.” “It’s a Jungle Out There” – somehow covered by Snoop Dogg a decade ago as the theme to the TV show Monk – is a description of how we could all be killed at any moment in “this world we love so much.” Maybe even before you finish this piece.
Even better is “Brothers,” a fictitious conversation between John and Robert Kennedy before the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Did you know that JFK thought of calling the whole thing to a halt over a secret affection for the Cuban singer Celia Cruz? Well, that didn’t happen, but it surely doesn’t matter when this tune hilariously describes it. “There’s a woman there in Cuba that I love,” he begins. “Oh no, Jack,” says a worried Bobby. Jack, the womanizer-in-chief, has to clarify: “Not in a bad way / But a good way.” And then the two get swept up in a reverie of claves and guiros. It’s a beautiful and deeply silly moment.
But Newman knows exactly when to pull back. Matter’s sentimental closer, “Wandering Boy,” is one of the most devastating songs he’s ever written – a lament from a parent to a rebellious, long-lost son. It speaks to a larger message of Newman’s songs: throughout the war, corruption and idiocy of man, there’s a tenderness, a beating heart.
And there’s even a growing sense of a greater someone in the universe, a shocker for such an atheistic songwriter. On 2008’s possibly autobiographical tune “Harps and Angels,” a 64-year-old Newman described a near-death experience from heart arrhythmia, and his wry glimpse of the afterlife. Now, this realization seems to have deepened. At the end of the madcap “The Great Debate,” in which his whole cavalcade of characters have tired themselves out from arguing about cosmic particles and giraffe evolution, they all join together as a gospel choir and sing these lines:
I know someone is watching me
Everywhere I go
Someone sees everything I see,
Knows everything I know.
Then Newman goofily jumps in as the MC: “We’ll take a break, ladies and gentlemen / The merchandise is moving!” Still, the stubborn thought remains. Maybe those lines are something that the astrophysicists, evolutionists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Communists, Kennedy brothers, long-suffering parents and Vladimir Putins that inhabit Dark Matter would do well to consider. They flail through every song on Matter with a bevy of unanswerable questions. But who knows – maybe they have a common way out in the end, a stubborn point of light in the darkness. Someone is watching me.
