Sail Away

RANDY NEWMAN

Reprise/Rhino

Sail Away skyrocketed to No. 162 on the Billboard album chart, which seems about right for an album built around Stephen Foster/Cole Porter Americana, lush orchestral arrangements and wicked satire. Several decades later, though, the album is an undisputed classic. Sail Away includes some of Newman's most enduring songs: the title track, "Lonely at the Top," "Political Science" (which mulls over the option of nuking those ingrate foreign countries), "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)" (wherein the Big Man looks down amusedly at his flock, wondering why they think so highly of him) and "You Can Leave Your Hat On." Sail Away has its tender moments, too, and all told it's an album of enormous beauty.

This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2006.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...