It placed 10th in the 1988 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll.[4] "Whether or not ['Dixie Flyer' and 'New Orleans'] are simple autobiography, they're presented as such," wrote Greil Marcus, "and for a man who's always sung as a character actor, it's a shock".[5] While "Dixie Flyer" was the name of the train line mentioned in the lyrics,[6] "Dixie" was also the nickname of Adele "Dixie" Fuchs/Fox, Randy Newman's mother, who, as the song describes, came from a southern Jewish family.
Chart performance
The album's single "It's Money That Matters" rose to the top of the Mainstream Rock chart for two weeks (and peaked at No. 60 on the Hot 100), to become Newman's only number one hit on any U.S. chart; it features Mark Knopfler on guitar.[7] Prior to the album's release, the song "Something Special" was closing title music for the 1987MGM production Overboard starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell and was also featured in the trailer of the film Awakenings, for which Newman also wrote the music, and the piano bridge from the song "Dixie Flyer" would subsequently often be utilized as break or filler music, most notably on the Car Talk radio program. The song "Falling in Love" features in the credits to the 1989 Tom Selleck film Her Alibi and was used as the opening theme of the short-lived 1990 ABC sitcom, The Marshall Chronicles.
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