Lonely at the top

The big musical event of the year - in fact, the event of the year - for me was supposed to have been Randy Newman performing in Tel Aviv. The concert was set for November 23, I had bought tickets, I had followed the set lists of his performances during an American tour preceding his European tour ... and then the tour was canceled for health reasons. During the tour, Randy had confided that his right arm was giving him a great deal of pain, and this obviously was bad enough to enforce rest.

I had been very excited when the concert was announced (at the beginning of October) and then my enthusiasm died down, waiting to be revived before the concert. So at the time of the cancellation announcement, I wasn't jumping up and down with excitement, and so the cancellation didn't cause me to slash my wrists in disappointment. Maybe the man can reschedule for next spring. If it's been nearly 20 years since his last appearance in Israel (Jan 1989), I can wait a few more months or years.

The timing of the American tour was very apt as it allowed airings of a song rarely played by the man: "Mr President (Have pity on the working man)". America in late 2008 is obviously similar to America in 1929. "A few words (in defence of our country)" is also a song which quite possibly could disappear from the set lists, and I have had arguments regarding the future of "Piece of the pie": at the moment, the rich are not getting richer but are losing more money in the stock market than those who don't have any savings.

In anticipation of Randy's visit, I dusted off a set of recordings which I had made in 2001, "Newman sings Newman", which preserved for posterity my take on 13 Randy songs. Listening to this with fresh ears, I was saddened to realise that half of the vocals were out of tune, and those that weren't sounded as if they had been recorded onto cardboard. Whilst the arrangements were ok, the instruments sounded on the hokey side. So I took it upon myself to rerecord the entire record.

This actually went extremely fast as the arrangements were good and simple. I would take a song, make a few changes and corrections, import the MIDI file into Reason, choose some instruments, create a sound file and then sing over it. In most cases, I needed only one or two vocal takes to nail a song, and most songs were completed within a matter of hours.

Listening to the new recordings again, I realised that most were competent but not outstanding, and so decided to improve my take on "Lonely at the top". One evening was spent changing the instruments - the original version was very brassy, and I decided to soften it up. Yesterday evening was spent tuning the arrangement, inventing new instrumental lines (I had been fairly lazy originally) and changing the ending, which now owes a lot more to my style of harmonic thinking than to Randy's. I need to do another mix, as the ending still sounds a bit too abrupt.

I also needed to duplicate the final sung line, "Oh, it's lonely at the top"; I located this line in my vocal file, isolated it, created a new file with just this one line, reversed the stereo, and slotted it in at the correct point. I find this kind of editing fairly hard, but yesterday luck was on my side and the entire process took only a few minutes.