During the 1970s, singer/songwriter Randy Newman distinguished himself by dodging the prevailing confessional trend that was de rigueur for his peers, preferring to build his songs around richly detailed, often grotesque characters, and taking his storylines from anyone's history but his own. By the late '80s, however, his parallel ambitions as a film composer now yielding a separate, equally distinctive body of work, Newman was relaxed enough to allow introspection: 1988's Land of Dreams spins Newman's childhood sojourn in wartime New Orleans into the wonderful, opening title song and the farcical "New Orleans Wins the War", relives grade school traumas ("Four Eyes"), and offers a bleak portrait of a marriage unravelling on the quietly devastating "Bad News from Home". These songs, and two atypically tender love songs, "Something Special" and "Falling In Love", are as close to autobiography as he's ever gotten. --Sam Sutherland