Suppose, for a moment, that teens and electric guitars hadn’t won. Suppose that pop music—in the pre-modern sense of the term, as in American popular song, the kind of music once enjoyed by grown-ups and kids alike, from the time of Stephen Foster to the heydays of Scott Joplin, George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Frank Loesser, and Burt Bacharach—had continued to flourish. Not in opposition to rock, but alongside it. And not in that proficient but retro-skewing Connick-Bublé way, but progressively, with new wrinkles and developments coming year after year.

It’s a notion that Randy Newman has often contemplated, especially when he thinks back to his early recording career. His eponymous debut album, released in June 1968, was heavy on strings and light on drums, its songs at once tuneful and outré, describable only in odd compound terms like “movingly sarcastic” (the bum’s-eye-view ballad “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”) and “mordantly tender” (the album’s opener, “Love Story,” whose young narrator envisions his and his girl’s entire future together, all the way to being sent away by their children to a retirement home, where they’ll “play checkers all day, ‘til we pass away”).

Big arrangements came naturally to Newman; his uncle Alfred, the oldest of his father’s six brothers, had from 1940 to 1960 been the musical director of Twentieth Century Fox, overseeing what was widely regarded as the best studio orchestra in Hollywood. Two other uncles, Emil and Lionel, were also composer-conductors. Why not wed that heritage to contemporary pop songs? For Randy and a few young compatriots in his native Los Angeles, including his fellow singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson and the two men who produced Randy Newman, Lenny Waronker and Van Dyke Parks, the late 60s were a time of open-ended pop possibility.

“There were records made that just didn’t pay any attention to rock ‘n’ roll, almost,” Newman told me at his house in Pacific Palisades, on an aptly Newman-ish day of torrential downpours in a city that otherwise seldom sees gray skies. “It was like [naïve, dreamy voice] ‘Oh, we’re going to have a new kind of music, an opportunity to do different things.’ ” Parks, just a few months ahead of Newman, had put out his own esoteric, richly orchestral debut, Song Cycle, and Nilsson, in 1969, recorded a piano-and-voice album wholly devoted to Newman’s songs. He called it Nilsson Sings Newman, a conscious evocation of Ella Sings Gershwin and the other “songbook” albums that Ella Fitzgerald had made in the 50s and 60s, each devoted to a canonical 20th-century songwriter. Exciting times: the Great American Songbook, presumed bound and finished, was about to have some strange new chapters glued into it.

But the dream didn’t pan out; those late-60s albums got good reviews but didn’t sell. Another ambitious album of the period, also of young-composer provenance and non-rock atmosphere, the Beach Boys’ Smile, with music by Brian Wilson and lyrics by Parks, was famously abandoned by Wilson, left incomplete. And, lo, the choogling rock hegemony prevailed. Newman described the new American music that he and his colleagues were attempting as “a branch of Homo that didn’t become Homo sapiens. It was like Homo robustus—well, no, because robustus wouldn’t be the right name for not having a drum. Back then, I felt it was almost like cheating to have a drum. Homo habilis, maybe?”

He went on: “I’ve often wondered if I’d have kept going in that direction, accompanying myself with an orchestra and taking things apart, what I’d have been. I think I’d have been interesting, right? But I don’t know whether anyone would have subsidized me, or found me as interesting as I did.”

The Family Business

As it is, things turned out O.K. for the songwriter, who turned 72 last November. He has managed, over nearly half a century, to find major record labels more than happy to subsidize him (he is currently with Nonesuch, a division of Warner Bros., where his recording career began), and, this summer, he will release his 12th, as yet untitled, studio album. In the time since he last put out a new album of original songs, 2008’s Harps and Angels, he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 2013) and honored in Vienna with the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award (in 2014), named for the Austrian-born composer whose scores for such films as King Kong and Gone with the Wind helped legitimize movie music as a calling and an art.

A PIANO MATERIALIZED IN RANDY’S ROOM WHEN HE WAS FIVE—“IN CASE I WAS MOZART.”

As part of the Vienna festivities, Newman conducted a section of his score for The Natural and then handed the baton to his cousin David Newman, one of Alfred’s sons and an eminent film composer in his own right (Ice Age, Hoffa, Anastasia), who led the orchestra through passages from Randy’s soundtracks for such films as Ragtime, Avalon, and A Bug’s Life. At the concert’s end, Randy rejoined the orchestra, sitting at the piano to sing his universally known song from Toy Story, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”