My girlfriend and I have been working on this project called One Song From for a few months now and thought people here might enjoy what we're up to! We're writing original 1-minute songs from made up musicals, and working with local Chicago musical performers to bring them to life on video via Instagram and Facebook.
"In Germany Before the War" by Randy Newman is a complete one-off in his catalogue, a chilling approximation of the Sondheim/Wheeler sound written several years before Sweeney Todd. It's not from a musical but it seems like it would have been, and it paints the picture of an alternate universe where Newman became one of Broadway's most acclaimed and adventurous composers.
Wowowow, I just went and listened to this song by both Randy Newman and Marianne Faithfall and I'm in tears. It's just chilling and beautiful and so, so sad. Thank you for posting.
darquegk said: ""In Germany Before the War" by Randy Newman is a complete one-off in his catalogue, a chilling approximation of the Sondheim/Wheeler sound written several years before Sweeney Todd. It's not from a musical but it seems like it would have been, and it paints the picture of an alternate universe where Newman became one of Broadway's most acclaimed and adventurous composers."
The song mentioned above, In Germany Before the War, is the “song about the child molester.” Newman is a satirist with a famously dark sense of humor, but he plays the self-delusion and queasy nostalgia of an old monster for his glory days pitch-black straight. It’s haunting.
But no worries, Newman is no more a pedophile than Sondheim is a cannibal baker.
Oh I see now. I had interpreted it totally differently. I thought it was about the holocaust and the little girl was a relative or neighbor to the man and she had been killed. I guess that's the great thing about art, it can evoke different emotions and meanings depending on a person's experiences or history.