Warren Zevon - The Wind
|
List Price: Our Price: $11.82 You Save: $7.16 (38%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.80 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for The Wind
Free Music Review: Culmination to Career by our Best Songwriter
Hit: 5 Stars
As fortunes go, Warren Zevon's career has been a frustrating one. Incredible highs and lows, often overlooked, always underappreceiated. With THE WIND, Zevon puts a coda on what is certainly one of the most outstanding and prolific output by any American songwriter, right up there with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. He's a match for anying Elvis Costello has ever done. But the topper? Zevon makes you think. Makes you evaluate your own life. Makes you cry and laugh (ok, sometimes at the same time). And makes you want to turn up the volume until it can't go any higher. Zevon totally rocks! THE WIND finds Zevon in incredible form. In its context as his last album, written furiously as his life was winding down, it's an incredible piece of work, ranking right up there with his very best albums. He rocks harder than he ever has (Disorder in the House and Numb as a Statue) and his tunes are as poetic and beautiful as ever (El Amor de mi Vida and Keep Me in Your Heart). The best thing about this album? It lasts. It's not one of those albums that you get sick of after listening to it five times. With THE WIND, the appreciation STARTS at the fifth listening. Listening to THE WIND makes you want to grab Zevon's other brilliant albums: Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy, Sentimental Hygiene, and Life'll Kill Ya. There are a slew of famous guest artists on THE WIND, but they are only window dressing: Zevon is the real thing. Warren Zevon's THE WIND is music to live (and party) your life to.Free Music Review: Now we know what it sounds like to die with dignity ...
Hit: 5 Stars
... It sounds a lot like "The Wind."Warren Zevon's 15th, and, in all probability, final album is a stunning piece of work that will serve as an everlasting monument to his artistic brilliance, courage and character.
Zevon embarked on making the album after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis in August 2002, not knowing whether he would live long enough to complete it.
Zevon's knowledge of his imminent passing informs nearly every track on "The Wind," but the album is anything but a maudlin, one-note downer. "Disorder in the House" (with Bruce Springsteen contributing backing vocals and lacerating guitar licks) and "Numb as a Statue" rock with the best of anything Zevon has ever recorded. Ry Cooder, David Lindley and Joe Walsh contribute dirty slide guitar to the deep-blues numbers "Prison Grove" and "Rub Me Raw.'"
There is a refreshing absence of self-pity throughout "The Wind," which makes the ballads - "El Amor de mi Vida," "Please Stay" and, particularly, the album's closer, "Keep Me in Your Heart" all the more heart-wrenching.
"Shadows and falling and I'm running out of breath," zevon sings on the latter. "If I leave, it doesn't mean I love you any less/Keep me in your heart for awhile."
Not to worry, my friend. You'll be there always.
Godspeed, WZ, and many thanks for some of the greatest music ever.
Free Music Review: Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Hit: 5 Stars
Under normal circumstances this would be a Zevon classic. Under these circumstances, with Warren working under a death sentence, "The Wind" plumbs emotional depths that go beyond music. Take these lines from "She's Too Good For Me"--"I could hold my head up high and say that I left first
Or I can hang my head and cry
Tell me which is worse."
Almost unbearable to listen to. However, don't get the impression that Warren is wallowing in self pity: far from it. The songs--which range from tender ballads to blistering rockers--exemplify a courage and strength that is truly inspirational. He says his good-byes and reflects on his predicament with his usual wit and well-crafted composition. But here, more than ever, he takes off the sardonic mask and lets us see him. In a no-nonsense way, without sentimentality (that nobody would fault him for) he tells us what's on his mind and in his heart:
"Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile.
You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse
Keep me in your heart for awhile."
Has a musician ever put more of himself into his work? I don't know, but as Warren's physical strength was winding down (you can hear it in his vocals), the power and beauty of his music was winding up. That he could be focused enough to produce any music at all is amazing. To leave us with such a touching, beautiful gift has got to be a miracle. Thanks, Warren.
Free Music Review: Perfect.
Hit: 5 Stars
(...)
Apart from its circumstances, this would be a very good record. In context, it's brilliant and poignant. Life'll Kill Ya is probably the best of Zevon's later work, strictly speaking, but it lacks the emotional power of The Wind. Most albums do. (Though listening to Life'll Kill Ya after Zevon's death does give that disc additional texture, particularly the title track and the closing number, Don't Let Us Get Sick.)
The disc's guest musicians add a dimension to the songs without being obtrusive. Bruce Springsteen took a jet to the studio for a few hours while on The Rising tour, and his contribution especially -- on Prison Grove and his prominent part in Disorder In the House -- has a spontaneity that infuses his songs with energy. Emmylou Harris' vocals on Please Stay are a terrific complement to Zevon's plaintive but not pitiful plea for company during his illness.
Throughout the album there is, unfortunately, a sense that any imperfection in the songs would be disastrous -- like Zevon is walking on tiptoes, quite unlike his wry, playful best songs. But he and the disc's producers don't let the finality distract from the quality of the record.
Knockin' On Heaven's Door, for example, could have come across as mawkish, but Zevon's execution and the production don't let that happen. That itself is testament to the considerable care and skill that went into the record.
Free Music Review: Tears to my eyes
Hit: 5 Stars
This is not Zevon's best work. Actually, no one album managed to pull together a substantial fraction of his best work, which is probably part of why he never made it as big as his less-talented contemporaries. As an album, _The Wind_ is of decidedly mixed quality, uneven and ragged.And yet.
And yet I can't listen all the way through it without tears coming to my eyes. Heck, I usually can't get past his "Knockin on Heaven's Door", which isn't even half way in.
For raw emotional power there is simply no competition with this album. Part of that of course is that it is Zevon's musical epitaph. But another big part of that is that this is an album that had to be ragged and uneven. The jagged edges of the songs give it an authenticity that cuts open your skull and pours the lyrics straight in. These are songs that could only have been sung by a dying man. _Werewolves of London_ era Zevon couldn't have done this. _Transverse City_ Zevon couldn't have done this. It would have rung false, so much purple poseur prose. No, it is only _The Wind_'s breathless, unsteady Zevon who can actually sell the apalling melodrama of death in his lyrics.
This isn't a great album. But it is precisely by not being a great ablum that it manages to be a truly extraordinary one. The rough edges bring us life and death as they are lived and experienced, one unsteady note at a time, from the roguish first to the resigned last beat.