Randy Edelman

There are easier ways for a man with Randy Edelman’s CV to spend his time. He could tour the film scores, take the applause forThe Last of the Mohicansand go home. Instead he has madeGreen Park, a ten-track album of new songs released September 25 on Cherry Red Records, and it is about as far from a victory lap as a record can get. It is small, personal and written from a park bench in the middle of London.

The park in question sits between Piccadilly and Buckingham Palace, the quiet Royal Park with the old trees and no flower beds, the one Londoners cut through on the way to somewhere else. Edelman did more than cut through. He has described the album as “a love letter” to a place where he spent some of the most treasured years of his life, and the record is bookended accordingly, opening with the title track and closing with “Short Walk in Green Park,” as if the listener is being led in through one gate and out through another.

London has been good to him for a long time. Years before Hollywood claimed him, British record buyers took his version of “Concrete and Clay” into the Top 20 and embraced “Uptown Uptempo Woman,” and the affection has clearly run both ways ever since. It is fitting, then, that the album lands on Cherry Red, a London independent that has been putting out stubbornly individual records since 1978, and that a set recorded in Los Angeles was partly mixed at Abbey Road.

Between the two park pieces sit eight songs that range well beyond the railings. The titles sketch the territory: “After All the Madness,” “Watching and Wishing,” “Farewell to Down St.,” “Paranoid Partner,” “12 Steps (Serenity Prayer),” “Flyin’ Blind,” “Piano Please” and “To Find You.” The label talks of nostalgia, resilience, serenity and human connection, and those are the right words for a writer looking back without getting sentimental about it. Edelman wrote, performed and produced the lot himself, bringing in a tight circle of players for colour: Trey Henry on bass, Grant Geissman on guitar, Brian Scanlon on saxophone, Susan Winsberg on flute and Till Richter on drums.

What makesGreen Parkinteresting is that it joins up the two halves of a career that are usually discussed separately. There is the songwriter who gave Barry Manilow “Weekend in New England,” the Carpenters “You” and LaBelle “Isn’t It a Shame.” And there is the film composer behindGettysburg,Dragonheart,The Mask,Kindergarten Cop,My Cousin Vinny,Ghostbusters IIandThe Last of the Mohicans, the score that earned him a Golden Globe nomination. On this record the melodist and the storyteller are the same person, working at the same piano, with a film composer’s feel for place applied to a few acres of grass in SW1.

The timing is no accident either. On December 19 Edelman returns to Carnegie Hall for the third time in his career with “Randy Edelman: American Original,” an evening of solo piano, voice and stories, with no band, no orchestra and nobody else on the stage. It is a bold way to play a room that size, andGreen Parkis the ideal companion to it: a record that trusts the song and the person singing it.

Five decades in, most artists are curating a legacy. Randy Edelman is still writing about where he has been and what it meant, and he has chosen a London park to say it. The city should take the compliment.

Green Parkis out now on Cherry Red Records. Randy Edelman performs “American Original” at Carnegie Hall, New York, on December 19, 2026.

All words by Eileen Shapiro. More of Eileen’s writing can be found in herauthor’s archive.