From Amazon.com
This 1979 studio project finds Southern California's most iconoclastic pop tunesmith between hits--in his case, an ironic and not always unhappy circumstance, given the mainstream's tendency to respond best to his broadest musical gags, exemplified by 1977's "Short People" and 1983's "I Love L.A."
Born Again proves either too savage ("It's Money That I Love"), too specific ("The Story of a Rock and Roll Band," a dig at the then-popular Electric Light Orchestra), or too subtle to mine the sort of airplay that those better-known hits reaped. Moreover, fans of Newman's stripped-down barrelhouse pop (epitomized by
12 Songs) or the rhapsodic orchestrations of his larger-scaled works (on
Sail Away and
Good Old Boys) may hear this as a middle ground, particularly in Newman's pragmatic embrace of synthesizers for orchestral coloration.
--Sam Sutherland