Music

LOS ANGELES — Randy Newman strolled along the wood planks of the Santa Monica Pier on a recent summer afternoon, a balmy ocean breeze rustling his short, curly hair that, at age 64, is mostly salt but retains a dash of pepper. A crowd of onlookers craned their necks in his direction, some with video cameras, others with cell-phone cameras, but a female security guard quickly waved them back.

In a just universe, this small throng would have been jockeying to celebrate the unique place Newman holds in contemporary pop music — anxious hordes looking to pump him for details about Harps and Angels, the long-overdue album he released Tuesday. Instead, the teens and twentysomethings looked right past one of the most respected songwriters of his generation to where Miley Cyrus was filming in front of the pier's roller coaster and Ferris wheel.

"Maybe," he said with characteristically deadpan delivery, "they think I'm Hannah Montana."

Newman long ago came to terms with the fact that he and the masses wouldn't be spending much time together, choosing instead to concentrate on creating a compelling and varied body of work that has spanned about 40 years and a number of venues. He has spent most of this decade being introduced as "Academy Award-winning composer Randy Newman" thanks to his Oscar win for the song "If I Didn't Have You" from 2001's Monsters, Inc. He has crafted more than a dozen film scores in all and even penned an autobiographical musical revue, "The Education of Randy Newman."

Each of Newman's albums has constituted practically a one-man reunion because they've been relatively few and far between. Despite the long gaps between studio releases — there have been just three in the last 20 years — Newman has plumbed the depths and shallows of the American psyche with greater consistency than perhaps any of his contemporaries, certainly with more precise musical acumen and lyrical illumination.

His songs have been a lightning rod for controversy, from "Short People" — "It's not a bad song," he says, 30-plus years later, "it's just a bad song to have a hit with" — to the new "Korean Parents," which has ignited heated debate for its pointed take on why Korean students excel academically.

"It's never quite what you think it is," said Lenny Waronker, who produced or co-produced most of Newman's albums, including Harps and Angels, of the meaning of the songwriter's lyrics. "He always takes a broader view. For a man who writes so few words, for them to have so many layers in a song, it's amazing."

In addition to a distinctive musical vocabulary that's part Stephen Foster, part Gershwin, part Professor Longhair, Newman's signature is songs in which the narrator's objectivity and honesty are suspect. "I love that in literature," he said. "What people choose to lie about tells you a great deal about them."

But since 1988's Land of Dreams, a set of autobiographical songs about his childhood in Los Angeles and the years when his family moved to be with his mother's relatives in New Orleans, he has ventured into more directly personal territory. He considers Harps and Angels the best record he has made. Admittedly, every musician tends to make that observation about a new recording, but given Newman's penchant for self-critique, the statement carries weight.

"There's a school that says, 'It doesn't matter if people love it or hate it, as long as they have a strong reaction,' " Newman said over a dish of cold salmon at an Italian restaurant across from the pier. "That's not me. I want people to like my stuff."