The best way to hear Randy Newman is alone. Hearing him at home with someone else snickering along to his jokes isn't much pleasure. Hearing him live, with other people around you, is peculiar torture. He's an excellent torturer. Not that that he's a bad performer, or that he makes bad art. It's the opposite of bad art -- done in fine strokes, with...

Of all the assessments of the Bush administration that have been set to pop music, few are as deadpan as Randy Newman's song ''A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,'' which Mr. Newman released last year on iTunes and has included on his first album of new material in nearly a decade, ''Harps and Angels'' (Nonesuch). Over the kind of stately piano...

Randy Newman walked onstage and straight to the piano at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night, and played his first chord almost before sitting down. In his dark pinstripe suit and open-collar dress shirt, he was sharklike and unsmiling. His demeanor seemed not exactly brusque, but markedly direct: against a benedictory backdrop of cheers and applause,...