On the title track of Harps and Angels, which opens Randy Newman’s first album of all-new studio recordings since 1999’s Bad Love, a man lies stricken on a New Orleans sidewalk, about to gasp his last breath. It’s clearly the Crescent City, given the loose, jazzy shuffle the band is playing, Newman’s languid drawl, and the laissez faire attitude of God himself when He appears to report that somebody up there had made a clerical error and the tearful guy on the pavement is not going to join his maker after all. That sets the tone for what follows: Harps and Angels boasts a deceptively easy-going quality even as it tackles matters of life and death, memory and loss, the discontents of the rich and famous, the problems of the poor, governmental malfeasance, corporate cynicism, and the veritable end of an empire – namely, our own.