If I were to die tomorrow, I think they'd say Newman 56, composer of the hit song, Short People. Jumped off a mountain today.
I'm interested in geography and weather and things like that, and if you don't write love songs, you've gotta go somewhere. I wrote a lot about places because that's what else there was. I had to stop myself from writing more of them.
Most of my songs are about insensitivity of some kind.
More of my songs are intended to be funny than almost anyone else. Sometimes maybe it cheers me up a bit. I've got a distance from it. Sometimes what I'm writing is more important to me than the rest of my life. It's more important to me that I'm writing well than anything else.
What I'm most pleased about is that there's no particular decline. The songs I wrote 40 years ago are no worse and no better - there's a consistency.
I started recording because I was always complaining about the records that I was getting of my songs. At least if I did them and messed them up, I wouldn't have anyone else to blame.
I've written a song for Prince. I never showed it to Prince, but just to see if I could do it. At the time, when I sort of knew him, he was recording a song a day. I wondered if I could do that. So I wrote it.
I've written about a lot of different things, but the whole idea of writing for another character is unusual for pop music... Most of the repertory is love songs, and most of mine isn't. I don't know if that's a mental defect, or shyness, or what.
The best of my songs are more than just a joke. There's something else going on - a character, or it's not just a plain joke.
The easiest thing I do is assignment songs. They tell me what they need me to write. I can do that fairly quickly. Writing for an orchestra is difficult. Writing songs [on your own] is most difficult of all. Though [writing for] the orchestra is close.
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