Their power chords and indelible riffs never compromise the singer's fondness for irony, surprising details and deft lyrical twists. ''Disorder in the House'' and ''The Rest of the Night'' are muscular rockers of the sort that earned Mr. Don Henley, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Emmylou Harris and Ry Cooder join him elsewhere on the album. He sings Bob Dylan's prayerful ''Knockin' on Heaven's Door'' with a kind of resigned intensity, demanding ''Open up for me!'' as a chorus of friends, including Jackson Browne and Billy Bob Thornton, chant the song's title. Zevon himself boasts in one typical title, ''I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.'' Now that mortality has edged out of the realm of metaphor, however, Mr. Violent characters litter his songs with corpses, and Mr. Zevon's work over the years, mostly as an adversary against which the defiant singer could prove his emotional mettle. And, on ''The Wind,'' he's used an occasion that might have proven ponderous or sentimental to say goodbye to his audience in a way that is at once dignified, high-spirited and touching.ĭeath has played a frequent role in Mr. (To cite just one example, a VH1 documentary about the making of ''The Wind'' will be shown this evening.) Rather than bitter, he seems grateful for the attention. Zevon, of course, is well aware that his illness has brought his music more notice than it's received at any point since the late 70's, when his album ''Excitable Boy,'' propelled by the offbeat hit ''Werewolves of London,'' sold a million copies. ![]() Zevon was found to have terminal lung cancer last March, however, that declaration sounds far more literal - and more poignant. ''SOME days I feel like my shadow's casting me,'' sings Warren Zevon in the opening line of ''My Dirty Life and Times,'' the first track on his new album, ''The Wind.'' Previously, a sentiment like that would have been just another wry treat from the singer's bottomless bag of rhetorical tricks: take a cliché and invert it, so that it's transformed into a blackly humorous punch line.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |