Born Again is the sixth album by American composer Randy Newman. The album was released on August 18, 1979, to little sales and relatively poor reviews, which surprised Newman. Newman went on to say that Born Again was the strangest album that he had ever done.[5] The album cover famously features Randy Newman in a business office, wearing white and black face makeup (an obvious parody of Kiss), with dollar signs painted over his eyes. This was poking fun at the commercialization of rock music.
Newman expected the album to be a hit. Instead, the album sold relatively poorly, with worse reviews than its predecessor.[6] Stephen Holden, writing for Rolling Stone, criticized the album for its "snide" and "nihilistic" tone.[7] Newman called it "a larger insult,"[2] and reflected, "The mistake I made was that to do this, people have to know who you are in the first place."[8] "It's a weird album full of peculiar songs like the one about an ELO fan getting everything wrong. It's very idiosyncratic, with small subjects. If it had been a hit to follow it might have been different but I have always written the same way."[6] Ironically, Jeff Lynne would later be among the producers of Land of Dreams.
