Composer Randy Edelman Reflects on His Career and Whether He’d Do One Last Score: ‘If it Were a Great Picture’

variety.com:

Jon Burlingame Randy Edelman‘s fame largely rests on his impressive roster of film scores—everything from his Golden Globe-nominated “Last of the Mohicans” to such big-grossing comedies as “Beethoven” and “The Mask,” and action flicks like “XXX”—but his career has encompassed so much more.

He’s written hit songs (notably “Weekend in New England” for Barry Manilow), won an Emmy for contributing soaring anthems to televised sporting events, and back in his singer-songwriter days, even opened for such diverse acts as The Carpenters and Frank Zappa.

So when he sits down at the piano on Dec. 8 at New York’s Carnegie Hall, audiences will be treated to a unique evening: Just the artist and a Steinway, playing some of his old hits, medleys of his movie themes and more recent songs (from his new album “Waltzing on a High Wire”), interspersed with off-the-cuff commentary on a wide-ranging life in music. “I do my thing, but it’s never exactly the same,” Edelman says, referring to similar gigs recently in London and Nashville. “I talk about things that are interesting to me, that tie in with the music.

It’s not ‘and then I wrote.’ Plus it’s all about my playing, and the songs.” Getting back to his roots? No, he says, pointing out that he started life as a classical musician and that his colossal success as a songwriter (“I never, ever in my life wrote a song for someone else”) and film composer (“there was a picture that ran out of money, I didn’t know, it was just a thing that came up”) were accidents of right place, right time.