Sail Away

Randy Newman and the abandonment of sincerity: Part One.

Those who listen to popular music, in any of its forms, do so with certain expectations, especially when it comes to lyrics. In part, these expectations are born from the tendency to conflate a singer with the words that they sing.

This is not something listeners are doing wrong; it’s not a mistake. It’s just how the art form has developed, culturally. Audiences like to believe in the truthfulness, or at least the sincerity, of a song. They like to imagine that a performer is sharing a part of themselves.

Singing is not quite like acting, then. Theatregoers and film-watchers appreciate the ability of actors to be unlike their ‘real’ selves, and, indeed, to play a variety of different characters over the course of their career. Even when a portrayal has been especially convincing, people can distinguish the actor from their character without any difficulty.

But when it comes to music, that distinction is harder to make. Most singers don’t perform ‘in character’. Instead, they have a public persona that may or may not be akin to their private selves. Some, of course, write songs that are (or are implied to be) autobiographical. But the ‘truth’, in that sense, doesn’t matter much. What matters is that the material feels like it could be autobiographical – even if it was written by someone else. The songs just need to uphold the persona, to create and sustain the idea of someone the audience wants to know, to like, and perhaps to love.

This accounts, to some extent, for the rather limited subject matter of most popular music. Songwriters lean on ‘safe’ subjects, such as love and lost love, because pretty much anyone can sing about them and sound sincere. Then – and this is a much smaller category – there are what you might call ‘story songs’. These are generally told in the third person, because that narrative distance (“This one’s not about me!”) gives a performer the freedom to expand their subject matter without sullying their persona.

It’s remarkable, in fact, how few songwriters treat their words as if they were meant to be understood as fiction. It’s remarkable how rare it is to hear songs sung in the first person, in which the ‘I’ is very obviously not the person singing. Rarer still will that ‘I’ be a character that the audience is not supposed to like.

As with any artistic trend or tendency, there are always exceptions. And few, in this regard, are as exceptional as Randy Newman.

Perhaps because he started out writing for other artists – and, as Pixar’s composer of choice since the success of Toy Story in the early nineties, he often writes songs for fictional and animated stories – he never adhered to the rules about ‘safe’ subject matter. There is no particular Randy Newman persona to maintain, and so his songs are always, essentially, sung by characters. They’re narrated by creeps, bigots, and fools, as often than they are by wistful lovers.

Predictably, this hasn’t prevented some listeners from failing to recognise the distinction between the singer and his material. Newman received severe criticism and even threats after the release of ‘Short People’, a ridiculous tirade against the vertically challenged, which is as blunt and blatant a piece of satire as it’s possible to imagine.

Nor has it prevented other artists – who have had far more success with his songs than Newman himself ever has – from treating his comic work as if it were serious. ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’, for instance, is a knowingly sleazy song; it’s meant to invoke a cringe and a laugh. But while some artists have appreciated that humour (or complicated it, like Etta James, in her funky, gender-reversed cover) the most famous versions, by Joe Cocker and Tom Jones, aimed for sexiness instead. And by trying to erase the joke, you might say they turned it on themselves.

Because they upend cultural expectations, Newman’s songs can sometimes be an uncomfortable listen. It does help when they’re funny. At least then you know how to respond. You can chuckle, and feel good about getting the joke. But sometimes, the songs aren’t funny at all. Sometimes, they’re just short stories, which can be weird, or flippant, or moving, or very dark indeed.

Such is the case with this song, the title track of his third solo album, from 1972, which is, I think, one of his greatest achievements.

If you’ve never heard ‘Sail Away’ before – and especially if you’ve never heard Randy Newman before – there’ll come a point in this song, early on, when you find yourself thinking: Is this really about what it seems to be about?

And the answer, you realise, is yes. It really is.

‘Sail Away’ is a song about slavery, sung from the perspective of a slaver. Which is a strange and troubling enough premise to begin with. But it gets more troubling still. Because missing from this song, throughout, is any hint of the immense barbarity, the violence, or even the trade of slavery. All of that is absent. Instead, the song imagines the slaver as a kind of salesman for his country, who uses the power of persuasion to convince people to come with him:

In America you get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

The confusion and discomfort the song provokes is part of what makes it so powerful. It forces the listener to think. Clearly, Newman isn’t suggesting that this is how things really happened, but it’s not immediately obvious what he is suggesting. The irony is complicated, and the character’s racism (which includes the use of an offensive slur) is hard to see past. It’s like a morbid joke without a punchline. You find yourself turning it over, searching for something you might have missed.

That turning over is important. It matters. Because, to my mind, the political work the song does is manifold, and it’s only by tripping the listener up, by making them stop and try to make sense of what they’ve heard, that its layers are revealed.

‘Sail Away’, I think, draws attention to violence by eliding it. Sometimes an absence is so glaring that it’s not really an absence at all. Sometimes a thing becomes more apparent through its erasure. To listen to Newman’s sanitised version of slavery is to have what is unsaid brought more vividly to mind.

This conjuring trick is especially powerful in performances of the song by Black artists. Ray Charles, Etta James, Glady Knight, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee all recorded ‘Sail Away’, and it’s hard to hear those recordings, to hear them sing of crossing ‘the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay’, and not feel . . . well, not feel what exactly? Moved, disconcerted, appalled. The words, in their voices, carry an irony that is almost too heavy to bear.

But the song isn’t just ironic, it’s also satirical. It ridicules those who have sought to minimise the awfulness of slavery. There have always been some in the United States who have refused to accept the idea of slavery as a kind of moral stain on the nation, who have implied, even, that slaves were better off than they had been in Africa.

Newman’s parody exposes that bullshit for what it is.

At a broader level, too, ‘Sail Away’ is a satire aimed at America itself, a country built on big promises. The final verse begins:

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family

That first line sounds, initially, like a bold claim. Except, of course, that it isn’t. Not only does the word ‘man’ deliberately exclude half the population, but the second line qualifies and modifies the first to such an extent that it ends up meaning next-to-nothing. The freedom to take care of your home and family is a pretty limited assurance when you think about it.

Newman’s career has been full of songs about the flimsy promises that America makes and breaks. He has written often about injustice and inequality – usually from the perspective of those who benefit from that social lopsidedness. ‘I’m glad I’m living in the land of the free’, another song goes, ‘Where the rich just get richer, and the poor you don’t ever have to see.’

It is one of Newman’s most persistent themes: that distance between the American dream and its reality, between the sales pitch, if you like, and the product. Rarely, though, has he shown that distance with such audaciousness, or – and this is another layer of irony in the song – with such beauty. The orchestral arrangement that rises and falls around the vocal is so lush, so soothing, even, that you could almost forget the horror of what you’re hearing.