Thomas Andrew (Tom) Lehrer (born April 8, 1928) is an American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician.
As an undergraduate student at Harvard University, he began to write comic songs to entertain his friends, including Fight Fiercely, Harvard (1945). Those songs later became The Physical Revue. Influenced mainly by the musical theater, his style consisted of parodying the then-current forms of popular song. For example, his appreciation of list songs (à la Danny Kaye's " Tchaikovsky") caused him to set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's " Major General's Song".
Inspired by the success of his performances of his songs, he paid for some studio time to record an album, Songs by Tom Lehrer, which he sold by mail order. Self-published and unpromoted, the album, which included the macabre ("I Hold Your Hand In Mine"), the lewd ("Be Prepared"), and the mathematical (" Lobachevsky"), became a success via word of mouth. With a cult hit, he embarked on a series of concert tours and released a second album, which came in two versions: More Songs by Tom Lehrer was studio-recorded, and An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert.
By the early 1960s Lehrer had retired from touring (which he intensely disliked) and was employed as the resident songwriter for That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a satirical TV show. An increased proportion of his output became overtly political, or at least topical, on subjects such as pollution ("Pollution"), Vatican II ("The Vatican Rag"), race relations ("National Brotherhood Week"), American militarism ("Send the Marines") and nuclear proliferation ("Who's Next?"). He also wrote a song which satirized the alleged amorality of Wernher von Braun. A selection of these songs was released in the album That Was The Year That Was.
