"I'm always in the mood for Randy Newman lately," says author Sarah Vowell, a regular contributor to This American Life, during her stint as guest DJ at KCRW in Santa Monica. Of course, as one might expect of Vowell, she's quick to add: "It seems like whenever the country's kind of at a low point, I’m always in the mood for Randy Newman."

Vowell includes Randy's late '90s tune "The World Isn't Fair" among the five favorite songs she brings to KCRW's Guest DJ Project. Randy first recorded it for his 1999 album Bad Love and re-worked the song for piano on his 2003 solo-piano Nonesuch debut, The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1. In the song, Randy offers the success of certain "froggish men, unpleasant to see," with their beautiful Hollywood wives, as a contemporary example of capitalist disparities Karl Marx might find repugnant.
 
"[T]he thing I really love about this song and it's something I guess I try to do writing about history," says Vowell, "is this song takes this turn in the middle." She continues:

He's talking about Karl Marx and his dream of fairness and how that all went to hell. And then Randy Newman tells this story about he has these little kids now and he's at their orientation and it's this Hollywood private school event and it's all these Hollywood mothers. They're all really pretty and they're all there with older, uglier men like him. And that's his way of telling Karl Marx that the world isn't fair and there's something about that example and just how personal it is that really just makes the song. You know, because who wants to listen to a song about how Marx's dream got shot to hell.

You can listen to Vowell's episode of the Guest DJ Project at kcrw.org.