One of the most sardonic, iconoclastic, musically adept and stylistically diverse singer-songwriters in the music industry, Randy Newman, remembering his relatives sweating out their movie score deadlines, initially avoided following in the outsized footsteps of his famous film composer uncles Alfred, Lionel and Emil and made his mark instead as a ground-breaking pop songwriter of the 1960s and 70s. ("Before gangsta rap, I was the roughest stuff there was, in terms of language and what I was dealing with.") Early on he developed his slightly arch trademark style of telling his songs in the
