[7] AllMusic's Mark Deming said although his sense of humor seemed more caustic than on his self-titled debut album, Newman's "most mordant character studies" on 12 Songs "boast a recognizable humanity, which often make his subjects both pitiable and all the more loathsome.

"[8] In the opinion of Robert Christgau, American songwriting in general is often "banal, prolix, and virtually solipsistic when it wants to be honest, merely banal when it doesn't", but Newman's truisms on the album are "always concise, never confessional", and unique: "Speaking through recognizable American grotesques, he comments here on the generation gap (doomed), incendiary violence (fucked up but sexy), male and female (he identifies with the males, most of whom are losers and weirdos), racism (he's against it, but he knows its seductive power), and alienation (he's for it).

Newman's music counterposes his indolent drawl—the voice of a Jewish kid from L.A. who grew up on Fats Domino—against an array of instrumental settings that on this record range from rock to bottleneck to various shades of jazz.

Music's Dave DiMartino observed some of Newman's "best-known earlier material" on the album, which he felt featured "a stellar trio of guitarists, including Ry Cooder, Clarence White and (The Beau Brummels) Ron Elliott.

[22] Rob Sheffield, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), cited it as the moment "where Newman got loose as a rock & roller, ditching the complex orchestrations for a bluesy, easy-swinging satire of America".