RANDY NEWMAN : BORN AGAIN

  1. It's Money That I Love
  2. The Story Of A Rock And Roll Band
  3. Pretty Boy
  4. Mr. Sheep
  5. Ghosts
  6. They Just Got Married
  7. Spies
  8. The Girls In My Life (Part 1)
  9. Half A Man
  10. William Brown
  11. Pants

Label : Warner Bros.

Release Date : August 1979

Length : 35:19

Review (AllMusic) : After the song "Short People" finally earned Randy Newman the hit single he claimed he always wanted (and in perhaps the worst way possible), Newman told reporters that for his next album he was preparing "a larger insult." And sure enough, Born Again was packed full of losers and misfits for whom Newman's contempt was unmistakable; from a man who had found some measure of understanding in his tales of thugs, stalkers, and slave traders on previous releases, the unmistakable bile Newman summoned up on "Half a Man," "Mr. Sheep," and "Pretty Boy" seems little short of perverse. And while Newman indulges in his usual passion for social satire here, "They Just Got Married" and "It's Money That I Love" are so stunningly unsubtle you have a hard time believing they came from the same man who wrote "Sail Away" or "Kingfish" (though "It's Money That I Love" has a piano line that would do Fats Domino proud). "The Story of a Rock and Roll Band" is a hilarious and deadly accurate parody of the Electric Light Orchestra (admittedly an easy target, but still beautifully executed), and the all-too-brief "William Brown" is a lovely vignette that wouldn't have been out of place on 12 Songs or Sail Away, but otherwise Born Again is the weakest non-soundtrack album of Randy Newman's career.

Review (Wikipedia) : Born Again is the sixth studio album by American musician Randy Newman. The album was released in August 1979, to little sales and relatively poor reviews, which surprised Newman. Newman went on to say that Born Again was the strangest album that he had ever done. The album cover features Randy Newman in a business office, wearing face makeup (an obvious parody of Kiss), with dollar signs painted over his eyes, appearing to poke fun at the commercialization of rock music. Newman expected the album to be a hit. Instead, the album sold relatively poorly, with worse reviews than its predecessor. Stephen Holden, writing for Rolling Stone, criticized the album for its "snide" and "nihilistic" tone. Newman called it "a larger insult," and reflected, "The mistake I made was that to do this, people have to know who you are in the first place." "It's a weird album full of peculiar songs like the one about an ELO fan getting everything wrong. It's very idiosyncratic, with small subjects. If it had been a hit to follow it might have been different but I have always written the same way." Ironically, Jeff Lynne would later be among the producers of Land of Dreams.