Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman is a four-disc box set released in November 1998 that chronicles the first three decades of singer songwriter Randy Newman's musical career.
Land of Dreams is a 1988 album by Randy Newman full of vignettes of his childhood in New Orleans. The most well-known song on the album is "It's Money That Matters", which rose to the top of the Mainstream Rock chart for two weeks, to become Newman's only number one hit on any U.S. chart. The piano bridge "Dixie Flyer" is commonly used as break/filler music on public radio and public television. wikipedia
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…
Unlike his contemporaries in the singer/songwriter community, Randy Newman has displayed little interest in writing about himself, with nearly every song in his repertoire set in the voice of some imagined character. So 1988's Land of Dreams was startling because its first three songs formed a triptych about Newman's childhood; for the first time on one of his albums, Newman was clearly writing about his own life, and the results were extraordinary…