Randy Newman was born on November 28, 1943. Newman is a singer-songwriter and composer of film scores, capable of writing both darkly ironic songs and lush orchestral Americana.

Newman grew up in Los Angeles. He studied music at UCLA but dropped out one semester before graduating. He sold his first songs at 17 and recorded his first single at 18. It went nowhere, and Newman focused on writing and arranging for the next few years. That included some work writing background music for television. A 1966 album of music from the nighttime soap Peyton Place is credited to “The Randy Newman Orchestra,” but Newman says he had no knowledge at the time that the album was being released, and he doesn’t include it in his official discography.

Newman had his first minor hits as a songwriter in 1964, when Irma Thomas recorded “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” (co-written with several other writers) and Jerry Butler recorded “I Don’t Want to Hear Anymore.” He was doing even better in England, where Gene Pitney (“Nobody Needs Your Love”) and the Alan Price Set (“Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear”) had Top 5 hits with Newman songs. (Newman’s own recording of “Simon Smith” appears on his 1972 album Sail Away.)

Newman released his self-titled debut album in 1968. Randy Newman sold so poorly that the label offered the people who did buy it the chance to swap it for any of the label’s other albums. Other singers and songwriters took notice, though, and the song “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” became something of a modern standard, recorded by dozens of singers.

The year 1970 was a good one for Newman. Harry Nilsson’s album Nilsson Sings Newman (for which Newman played the piano) was a critical success that helped smooth the way from Newman’s second album, 12 Songs. The new album was more stripped-down than Newman’s first album had been, placing the focus on Newman’s voice and piano. And a cover version of one of the 12 Songs, Three Dog Night’s version of “Mama Told Me (Not To Come),” went to #1 on the pop charts.

By 1974, Newman had developed enough of a following that Good Old Boys made the Top 40 on the album chart. It was a collection of songs written in the voices of rural Southerners, including the lacerating “Rednecks,” a critique of both Southern racism and Northern hypocrisy in thinking that racism was only a Southern problem.

The 1977 album Little Criminals did even better, reaching the top ten on the strength of the unexpected hit single “Short People,” which climbed to #2. Newman would later say that he regretted the success of the song, which made people think of him as a novelty act, and he was astonished by how many people thought the lyrics (“short people got no reason to live”) were meant to be taken seriously as a bigoted statement, rather than as a commentary about bigotry.

Newman straddled the line again with “I Love LA,” from the album Trouble in Paradise. The song could be interpreted as either a bouncy anthem of boosterism or as tongue-in-cheek criticism of the city’s overly sunny attitudes. It wasn’t successful when it was released as a single in 1983, but it was featured in several ad campaigns during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (edited down to its most upbeat moments), and has been seen as an unofficial anthem for the city ever since.

Newman entered a new phase of his career in 1981, when he wrote the score to the movie Ragtime, and received two Academy Award nominations for his work. Given his family background, it might have seemed inevitable that Newman would eventually turn to write film scores. Five members of his family —uncles Alfred, Lionel, and Emil, and cousins Thomas and David—are also Oscar-nominated film composers. Collectively, the Newmans are the most nominated family in Oscar history, with 92 nominations and 12 wins.

Since the late 1980s, Newman has focused more on film work, scoring more than two dozen movies, including nine animated movies from Pixar. He’s earned twenty Oscar nominations, and has won the award for Best Original Song twice, for “If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters Inc., and for “We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3.

Newman hasn’t abandoned pop songwriting entirely. In 1995, he wrote Randy Newman’s Faust, a rock-musical version of Goethe’s classic deal-with-the-devil story. The concept album of the musical featured an impressive cast—Don Henley, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, and Newman himself as Mephistopheles.

In 2003, the first of three Randy Newman Songbook albums was released, featuring Newman’s new recordings of some of his favorites from his body of work, accompanying himself on the piano. Albums of new songs are less common than they once were, but Newman produces a new album every decade or so, most recently 2017’s Dark Matter, featuring the Grammy-winning song “Putin.”

Newman was inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 2002, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. Many more of his albums and film scores are available for streaming at Hoopla.