Randy Newman limps across the blue carpeting of his home studio, past the grand piano and a window looking onto a stream running through his back yard, and pauses at a cluttered countertop, his eyes settling on a piece of sheet music. "This is a song I had to write for a goddamn alligator," Newman says.

In the early Seventies, Newman released three of the darkest, wittiest albums of the decade: 12 Songs, Sail Away and Good Old Boys, featuring unreliably narrated songs about rednecks, slave traders, circus freaks, floods, dying fathers, stripping girlfriends, Huey Long and (in the role of villain) God. Over the past 13 years, though, the 64-year-old has reached the widest audience of his career by writing songs for Pixar movies like Cars, Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story. The alligator song is for an upcoming Disney film called The Princess and the Frog. "They showed me a clip," Newman says. "It's set in New Orleans in the Twenties. It was a scene in a restaurant with white people and black people all sitting together, laughing. I said, 'Oh, you're making a science-fiction movie?' The studio people said, 'Ha ha . . . uh, what do you mean?' " Newman shakes his head at the stupidity of the world — so consistently his attitude that you could caption pretty much every picture ever taken of him that way. But in 2006, the historic stupidity of the current administration prompted Newman to write a new song for adults, "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country," in which he offers a funny, backhanded defense of the Bush-Cheney regime by pointing out they're not as bad as Hitler, Stalin, the Caesars or King Leopold of Belgium. Last year, Newman released the song as a low-resolution YouTube video, just him at the piano, shot in a single frame. The Internet responded with love, and Newman had his first unaffiliated-with-an-animated-motion-picture hit since the goofy "I Love L.A." went into heavy rotation on MTV in 1983.

"A Few Words" is featured on the just-released Harps and Angels, Newman's first album of new material in nine years. In the opening words of the opening song — the title track — he slyly sings, "Hasn't anybody seen me lately/I'll tell you why," over a bluesy piano roll. The song goes on to detail a near-death experience in which the narrator has a Technicolor vision of heaven, Newman all the while singing the way he speaks, in a nasal drawl redolent of the bayou. (Newman spent time as a child visiting his mother's family in New Orleans.) Elsewhere, "Losing You" and "Feels Like Home" are gorgeous, straight ballads, while "Potholes" is a hilarious, meandering story-song that looks at the bright side of age-related memory loss.

It's a welcome return to form for Newman, one of the greatest songwriters of the rock era — though his songs rarely rock and often have more in common with Tin Pan Alley and show tunes. In conversation at his Pacific Palisades home, which he shares with his second wife, Gretchen, and their two teenage children, Newman sips a Diet Coke and seems perpetually bemused by his life and the state of the world.

"A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" feels like a different kind of Randy Newman song to me. It has a similar humor, but . . .

Yeah, it's a different sort of narrator.

Right. It feels less like a narrator and more like something coming from you.

It does, yeah. I've always thought it was too easy just to say, "War is bad." Or, "The Bush administration is bad." I mean, yeah. . . . Well, you can't even say, "Of course it is," because there's people that don't think so. I played this song in Meridian, Mississippi, and they laugh, all right, but they go "oooh" at the "worst administration" line. They don't think it is the worst. That's the way it goes. It's a free country.

I found an early quote from you —

That's the problem.

— from an interview in the mid-Seventies, where you said other than your songs about race —

Did a lot of 'em.

— that you were essentially apolitical. The quote was "I don't think my views are of any interest."

Well, apparently they were.

So did something change?

Yeah. It's been so noisy. And the Bush people are going away, and it just felt as if . . . well, not that I had to write about it. It's not like a comment was expected from me, like I'm Will Rogers or something. But I just wanted to say something. I rarely have an idea when I sit down to write. But this time I did.

The song "Harps and Angels" also sounds more like your voice than a narrator's: "Hasn't anybody seen me lately. . . ." "You boys know I'm not a religious man. . . ." Had you been sick when you wrote it?

No, nothing like that. I've just always been interested in heaven. I love depictions of it — not the particularly serious ones, but those old movies with angels and things like that. A movie like The Green Pastures, which you'll never see on television, because it's kind of offensive, I guess. But a great picture, just beautiful. Or even the Jack Benny movie The Horn Blows at Midnight, where Benny is the third trumpeter in the heavenly orchestra. I've always liked that kind of stuff. And sometimes you do think, "Jeez, it'd be great if there were an afterlife." Especially if you're sixtysomething, like I am, and you meet someone who's religious, and you think about how they have that faith. I mean, it doesn't make you want to run out and hold up a banner for atheism. What's the point? "Follow me! Don't believe in an afterlife!" In my song, the guy has a vision of all this fantastic stuff, and he says, "It's good to know there really is an afterlife. And I hope to see all of you there. Now let's go get a drink."