“Harps And Angels”, Randy Newman’s first studio album of all-new material in nearly a decade is, by turns, hilarious, poignant and scathingly satirical.

The album was co-produced by Mitchell Froom (Crowded House, Los Lobos), who worked with Newman on 1999’s Bad Love and his Nonesuch debut, The Randy Newman Songbook Vol.1, and by Lenny Waronker, Newman’s childhood friend and the producer of his sublime early recordings, including Randy Newman, 12 Songs and Sail Away.

On the title track, Newman enacts the story of a suddenly repentant musician who has an illuminating conversation with God while lying stricken on a New Orleans street. More often, though, Newman takes a more direct, button-pushing approach: He advises the newly rich and famous on “Easy Street;” offers a unique solution to America’s educational crisis on “Korean Parents;” and explores the yawning chasm between rich and poor, with a mix of humour and vitriol, on “A Piece of the Pie,” setting the tune to a madcap orchestral arrangement. There are also moments of great tenderness, especially on “Losing You” and “Feels Like Home,” plus some funny /sad autobiography on “Potholes,” about the vagaries of memory.

“Harps and Angels” often has an easy-going, Crescent City feel, with Newman on piano fronting a small combo and revealing, as Rolling Stone put it after the Carnegie Hall show, “his serious love and study of the New Orleans piano tradition”.