Bad Love (1999)

Randy newman hasn't written many funnier passages in his 30-year-plus career than the diatribe that erupts late in a new song called ''Shame,'' in which he explores the mindset of an aging sugar daddy trying to woo back his pretty young thing but unable to keep his inappropriate anger under wraps. ''You know what it feels like to have to get up in the middle of the night and sit down to take a piss?/You do know?/So you say/I have my doubts, Missy.'' Moments later, he's bribing her with keys to the Lexus.

If you know Newman, you know there'll be more bad guys where this one came from in Bad Love, his first new collection of assorted vocal numbers in 10 years. (That's not counting 1995's star-studded, star-crossed theater project Faust or his mountain of accumulated film scores.) ''Bad Love'' is really an album about bad lonesomeness, even if Newman inevitably favors the spot where lonely turns into nasty. His best work has always produced the queasy feeling that he (and you) could relate to his untrustworthy narrators, and there's plenty to identify with in ''Better Off Dead,'' an Esquivelesque ode to fatal attractions, or ''I Want Everyone to Like Me,'' the shuffle that agreeably closes the album.

Most uncharacteristic is ''I Miss You,'' a letter to an ex-wife that eschews any cleverness in the service of repeating the title phrase over and over, along with the first sincere apology in his oeuvre. (The one conceivable chuckle comes when he pictures his divorcée ''laughing (her)self sick up in Idaho,'' but that's where Newman's ex really lives, so shut up.) Contemporary pop's most gifted melodist isn't in danger of coming up with too much material that's lyrically melodious, mind you. But if he'll never be a ''sensitive'' singer-songwriter, Newman does seem interested, finally, in finding the place where nasty turns back into lonely.

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