Warren Zevon - The Wind
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Free Music Notes for The Wind
Free Music Review: Not good because he's passed, good because it'll last
Hit: 4 Stars
Warren Zevon passed away, and while I admit that it might have helped in his record sales/popularity of the album, that should not take anything away from the high quality of the album itself. For the Bitter Lion witch and the wardrobe who gave it one star I truly wonder what kind of music you listen to because it can not be any type of folk/rock because you'd know the strength of these songs. While not complex in the songs themselves they are sung in a way that makes me think of Tom Waits. They are sung with soul, not from a man who was on his last legs, but from a man that still had years of singing left to do. Warren may not have been a household name for many, but the fact that so many great artists helped make this record should speak volumes to the respect he had in the music world. He was more then just a session player, and this record shows that. Songs like "please stay" and "she's too good for me" are sung with feeling and any record that someone puts there heart and soul into while like he did deserves respect.Free Music Review: An Introduction...and a Farewell
Hit: 5 Stars
This album blows me away.The only thing I knew about Warren Zevon were the songs "Werewolves of London," "Lawyers, Guns, and Money," and "Oh, Daddy." There they were, lurking in my subconscious. Then I heard Kurt Anderson speaking about Warren and his inoperable lung cancer, and some of the collaborations with some of my favorite artists - Joe Walsh, Bruce Springsteen, Ry Cooder - on this album, ironically named, The Wind.
In a remote corner in a shop in Baghdad, there it was: The Wind. I picked it up. And was appropriately blown away. It's my understanding that Zevon always wrote and performed what he felt. This album is no exception.
The album does everything from celebrate life ("Disorder in the House," "The Rest of the Night"), to reflect on the road not chosen ("El Amor de mi Vida"), and say farewell to a lover ("Keep me in your heart").
This is musical hospice. And in sharing it, Warren brings himself to ordinary people, as an ordinary person with an extraordinary perspective.
If you listen to the album with the understanding of its having been written and performed while he faced down the Grim Reaper, you'll be all the richer for having heard it.
Worth whatever you'll pay for it.
Free Music Review: I Truly Miss Him....
Hit: 4 Stars
That voice, the twisted sense of humor, the songs. There will never be another like him. This final, touching LP by one of the greatest, most distinct singer-songwriters to emerge during the 70's is reason alone to check out his entire body of work. Just think, if he was this good at the end of his life, think of how awesome he was in his prime! Also highly recommended is "My Ride's Here" from 2000. If you're not in tears, or at least very moved by the time you get to the closer "Keep Me In Your Heart" and the sound of his fragile voice, then you have no heart. We really lost a great one.Free Music Review: News From Mr. Death
Hit: 4 Stars
One lesson learned from the recent success of Warren Zevon's epitaph album, The Wind, is that any artist struggling too long for that big break probably hasn't tried dying yet. As the speed with which Zevon's final album is flying off the shelves demonstrates, there is no better way of boosting record sales than a well-timed death. The album, released just two weeks before Zevon succumbed to lung cancer, sold over 50,000 copies in only its first week out of the gate, making it his first top forty album since 1978's Excitable Boy. Mostly, Warren Zevon's name might get passed around a few dinner tables now and then, and, in a reasonably informed household, the grumbly old man will grunt something like "oh, yeah, the werewolf guy who died of cancer," before stuffing another forkful of canned lasagna in his face. Yes, it's true, Zevon wrote the immortal "Werewolves of London," and if he is remembered for nothing more than its instantly captivating piano riff and that wolf guy strolling the rainy streets of Soho for some Beef Chow Mein, well, that's more than most schmucks will be able to say for themselves when their cards are called.
It is also true that Zevon did indeed fall prey to cancer at 56 years old Sunday, September 6th, 2003, but not without having something to say about it. He had a whole lot to say, actually-nearly 3 decades worth of death, blood and gore. Zevon always seemed like the kind of guy who'll take fangs over flowers any day of the week. That said, it seems most fitting that Mr. Zevon's last word includes some of the most emotionally urgent music of his life, void of even the slightest pose or mask; though a few of the album's real rockers do pack a claw or two.
Death's approach galvanizes even the most mundane lyric on The Wind. When Zevon sings "Let's party for the rest of the night . . . we may never get this chance again," he means it quite literally. The tune itself rocks with the fury of war, as Tom Petty and his trusty Heartbreakers sidekick, Mike Campbell, rock and howl their way right through the song's last line.
Most remarkable is Zevon's apparent ease with the fate that awaits him, as though, after learning from his doctor of the inoperable tumor in his lung, he decided to record The Wind in celebration, not despair, for the life he was about to lose. One can hear Zevon audibly trading chuckles with members of the band on numerous tracks as they erupt into song together. "Let's do another bad one, then," Zevon tells his bandmates before lapsteel guitarist David Lindley rips into "Numb As A Statue," the album's fourth track, "because I like it when the blood drains from Dave's face."
Of the many renown friends that joined Zevon to help him make what they knew would be his last album -- names like Bruce Springsteen, Ry Cooder and Don Henley top the list -- still the primal drum work of lesser-known Luis Conte raises "The Rest of the Night" to the height of its booming promise. One icon falls; another gets busy making his name.
But while similar tracks would rock most other acts off the stage: the stomping, electric blues of "Rub Me Raw" or Springsteen's jangling guitar searing through the frenzied "Disorder in the House," for instance, it is the album's surprisingly tender moments that make it a masterpiece. Concluding with one of the most poignant codas in rock history, the divine, understated "Keep me In Your Heart," The Wind congeals into a uniquely sincere and confident embrace of human mortality. "Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath/keep me in your heart for a while/If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less/keep me in your heart for a while," Zevon croons along to Jorge Calderon's accoustic guitar and the legendary Jim Keltner's shuffling drums.
It is interesting to note another song that begins with an image of "falling shadows": "Not Dark Yet," by one of the many noted comrades Zevon gathered over the years, Bob Dylan:
Shadows are falling and I've been here all day
It's too hot to sleep time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal
There's not even room enough to be anywhere
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
Whether or not Warren had Dylan's song in mind when penning his own, it is just as preciously coincidental as it is moving. This is not the only shadow Dylan casts over the album. Zevon's taut cover of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" is nothing short of sublime. The timeless tune is another of the album's bitingly appropriate and all too literal anticipations of finality.
Arguably, though, the album's highest moment arrives amid the ghostly, possessed chants of "Prison Grove":
Dug in, hunkered down,
Hours race without a sound
Gonna carry me to where I'm bound
Looking down on Prison Grove
Iron will hard as rock
Hold me up for the fateful knock
When they walk me down in a mortal lock
Out on Prison grove
Zevon groans as a harrowing swarm of voices that sound like the mantras of the dead howl "Shine on/Shine on all these broken lives/Shine on/Shine the light on me," as though begging for a break from some underworld of their own doing. Everyone and their mothers chime in for this one, including old pals Jackson Browne, Billy Bob Thornton, T-Bone Burnett, Bruce Springsteen and, of course, Warren himself. The effect is chilling as Warren snarls "come on!" before each additional chant, as though daring death to show its face amid such dark divinity. Ry Cooder is in rare form here; his famous slide guitar rivaling even the licks he got in on John Hiatt's brilliant Bring the Family seventeen years ago. Cooder's prowess captures perfectly the immediacy and courage with which Zevon confronts his own impending demise. "They say you'll hear your own bones crack," Zevon asserts, "When they bend you back to bible black." Well, Warren, is it true?
Free Music Review: Sadly, a disappointment
Hit: 2 Stars
I loved Warren Zevon's work and had high hopes for his sad, last original album but this one just doesn't cut it. Dirty Life & Times and Keep Me In Your Heart can be numbered among his best but the rest of the tracks are--well--lacking. I do note the exception of Knockin' On Heaven's Door--which is well-sung and arranged but still offers nothing more than what Dylan or Clapton had already given it. The much anticipated Disorder In The House has more of a jam feeling to it rather than a finished track. Nothing wrong with a good jam session but you'd like at least one of the singers to be on key. Rub Me Raw has a great blues arrangement but the lyrics aren't much. The rest of the cd is rather bland. You'd do better to look for the good complilations available out there. Maybe wait until a new one comes out with the three good tracks included from this cd. I wish it had been better.