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Singer-songwriter Randy Newman played the Calvin Theatre in Northampton Sunday night.

NORTHAMPTON - About a third of the way through his concert Sunday, Randy Newman stopped to make the observation that a lot of veteran rock 'n' rollers don't seem to know when to retire. As he put it, with the wry, self-deprecating humor that colors so many of his songs, "The stage is clogged with ... gray-haired people."

Then he went on to sing a song that included the line "I'm dead and I don't know it," followed by the audience's refrain, "He's dead, he's dead," belted out, as he pointed out, with almost too much gusto.

Of course, just as with so many of Newman's songs, the lyrics serve to emphasize the exact opposite: At 64, the gray-haired Newman is still writing some of the best songs around - songs that make you laugh ("Potholes"), make you mad ("My Life is Good") and make your cry ("Feels Like Home").

His 2½-hour concert at the Calvin Theatre had them all, including several from his new album "Harps and Angels," which bolsters the argument that Newman, an Academy Award-winning singer-songwriter, composer, arranger and piano player, is only getting better with age.

Undoubtedly, he's still winning his share of kudos from critics. A Los Angeles Times' review of the album says "Newman plumbs the depths and shallows of the American psyche with greater consistency than perhaps any of his contemporaries, certainly with more precise musician acumen and lyrical illumination."

Newman's genius? He gets under your skin by tickling your ribs.

In the title song from "Harps and Angels," for example, he sings about what might have been a near-death experience, complete with heart palpitations and a fall to the ground. When he sends out a prayer "just in case," a chorus of heavenly bodies ("they sounded like background singers") answers and a "voice full of anger" tells him: "You ain't been a good man / You ain't been a bad man / But you've been pretty bad."

Who among us can say they haven't been "pretty bad," too?

He ends with an invitation:

So actually the main thing about this story is for me

There really is an afterlife

And I hope to see all of you there

Let's go get a drink

He moves effortlessly from a hilarious political satire to a simple, poignant ballad. On Sunday, he told the audience he wrote his love song "I Miss You" for his first wife, while married to his second.

I want to thank you for the good years

and apologize for the rough ones

you must be laughing yourself sick

but I wanted to write you one before I quit

and this one's it

The strength of his lyrics owes to closely observed details of daily life. In "Dixie Flyer" he writes about a train trip to New Orleans when he was a child and he and his mother relocated from his native Los Angeles. His grandmother met them at the station, "dressed as black as a crow in a coal mine." His aunts and uncles drove from Jackson, Miss., to see them in "a great green Hudson driven by a Gentile they knew / Drinkin' rye whiskey from a flask in the back seat."

Newman's as versatile a piano player as he is a songwriter, hammering out bawdy, honky-tonk phrases and dissonant chords or coaxing sweet melodies from the keyboard as the lyrics dictate.

Over the last 20 years, he's earned a reputation as a film composer, writing scores for "Ragtime," "The Natural," as well as a host of Pixar films, like "A Bug's Life" and "Cars."

Along the way, he's played with dozens of the greatest musicians of our times, from Elton John to Crosby, Stills and Nash to Ry Cooder, and many others he might describe as aging, gray-haired rockers. His songs have been covered by Joe Cocker, Tom Jones, Three Dog Night and Etta James. His 1974 song "Louisiana 1927" became an anthem in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, played widely on radio and television.

Curiously, the Calvin Theatre was only about two-thirds full, making me wonder why one of America's best songwriters hadn't packed the place. If he hasn't already, Newman's likely to have an answer to that question - no doubt poking fun both at today's musical tastes and himself - in another song.

Hopefully, I'll be on hand to hear him sing that one, too.