Randy Newman!! A true king of songwriters!!
This song is one of his absolute best.
Very nice version, Sir!
I see that Katie Melua and Marianne Faithful are now coming up in the featured box,
with slow brooding discordant versions of the song. For some reason I am reminded
of that other song about a killer by Kurt Weill "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" and in
my head I have always heard the Newman song as a tango played in a seedy bar in Berlin.
This is the most uncomfortable song I have ever sung, because of the history behind it.
There is just something menacing in the lyrics even when Newman sings it slow and wistful.
When doing some research on the song I discovered that there are over 100 songs dealing
with killers... some fictional and some not. Mac the knife, Ode to Billy Joe, Lizzie Borden,
Tom Dooley, Bonnie and Clyde, but the most chilling for me is Sufjan Stevens' "John Wayne Gacy Jr."
Although Nick Cave presses him a close second when he does a duet with Kylie on "Where the wild roses grow"