12 Songs

On his debut album, Randy Newman sounded as if he was still getting used to the notion of performing his own songs in the studio (despite years of cutting songwriting demos), but apparently he was a pretty quick study, and his second long-player, 12 Songs, was a striking step forward for Newman as a recording artist. While much of Randy Newman was heavily orchestrated, 12 Songs was cut with a small combo (Ry Cooder and Clarence White take turns on guitar), leaving a lot more room for Newman's Fats Domino-gone-cynical piano and the bluesier side of his vocal style, and Randy sounds far more confident and comfortable in this context. And Newman's second batch of songs were even stronger than his first (no small accomplishment), rocking more and grooving harder but losing none of their intelligence and careful craft in the process…

One evening in April 2020, at the height of Italy’s lockdown, Ludovico Einaudi waited until his family had gone to bed before taking out his iPhone to record himself at the piano. 12 Songs From Home is the result—an intimate record of a solitary artist, performing pieces from his most acclaimed solo albums. Since the start of Italy’s quarantine, the pianist and composer had been streaming concerts from home to thousands of fans. “I started to enjoy these connections because I had to cancel my concerts,” he tells Apple Music. “So for those audiences, and also for the many others that had to stay at home, I played a few times.” Einaudi then had the idea of creating a snapshot of those concerts. “I thought that it would be nice to remember the moments that we all shared. So I decided to revisit some of my repertoire over the past years—music from the late 1990s up until now. And I made a collection of 12 songs from different periods. It was a very simple idea.”