
American Song
American Song is a podcast that traces the origins and development of American - and ultimately world-wide - forms of modern musical entertainment. Over time, we will trace every major genre from its origins through the current day.American Song looks at the development of our music through the lens of social, political, and economic changes that were occurring in each case, and we'll feature the most important musicians in each genre.Every episode is chock-full of the music we love and where possible, we include archival interviews so you can hear about, in the actual words and voices of these great musicians and singers, the motives and passions that drove their creativity.
American Song
Warren Zevon's Beautiful Wreckage
In this episode of American Song, we explore the life and legacy of Warren Zevon, one of America’s most fearless and darkly funny songwriters. Known for his biting wit and uncompromising honesty, Zevon built a career chronicling the messier sides of the human experience—addiction, regret, heartbreak, and mortality.
From his early days as a struggling songwriter in Los Angeles to the unexpected success of “Werewolves of London,” Zevon never stopped grappling with the contradictions of fame and self-destruction. We trace how his battles with alcoholism nearly cost him everything, and how sobriety led to some of his most poignant work, including “Detox Mansion” and “Reconsider Me.”
When faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Zevon responded the only way he knew how: with humor and unflinching clarity. His final message—“Enjoy every sandwich”—has become a lasting reminder to savor the ordinary moments, even when life feels overwhelming.
Drawing parallels between Zevon’s story and today’s America, we consider what his example has to offer in an era of division, anxiety, and distrust. In a time when many feel adrift, Zevon’s insistence on telling the truth—even when it was uncomfortable—feels more important than ever. His songs are proof that honesty and irony can coexist with tenderness and hope.
Through archival interviews, cultural commentary, and the music itself, this episode reflects on what it means to face your demons, make peace with impermanence, and still find something worth laughing about. Whether you’re a lifelong fan or just discovering his work, this is an invitation to see Warren Zevon not just as a songwriter, but as a guide to living—and dying—with your eyes wide open.
Warren Zevon's Songs In This Episode
- Desperadoes Under the Eaves
- Veracruz
- I'm Your Mutineer (Bob Dylan)
- French Inhaler
- Outside Chance (The Turtles)
- Follow Me (Lyme & Cybelle)
- Poor, Poor Pitiful Me
- Tenderness on the Block
- Werewolves of London
- Lawyers, Guns & Money
- Detox Mansion
- Sentimental Hygiene
- Raspberry Beret (Prince Cover)
- Run Straight Down
- Splendid Isolation
- I Was in the House Til the House Burned Down
- For My Next Trick, I'll Need a Volunteer
- Disorder in the House
- Keep Me in Your Heart For A While
- Mutineer
- Keep Me in Your Hear For A While (Eddie Vedder)
- Looking For the Next Best Thing
Archival Interviews
- Crystal Zevon
- Waddy Wachtel
- Jason Zevon
- Warren Zevon
- David Letterman
Related Episodes - Dig Deeper!
The Singer-Songwriters: Truth to Power/ Bruce Cockburn
God's Song and Other American Prayers: The Story of Randy Newman
The Singer-Songwriters: Part One/ Bob Dylan
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n our last episodes, we spent time with Bob Dylan, the master of reinvention, and Randy Newman, who made a career out of poking America right in the eye. Today, we turn to Warren Zevon—whose songs were like little Molotov cocktails lobbed at polite society.
Zevon wrote about mercenaries and sociopaths, about men who can’t stop ruining things—including themselves. He understood that sometimes the only sane response to disaster is to laugh, preferably with a cigarette in one hand and a whiskey in the other.
This episode isn’t just about Zevon’s music. It’s about the America that shaped it—and the America we’re still stuck with. A country that watches a president lie every day on television, then pretends it’s normal. A country that ignores the evidence of climate change because it might be inconvenient for quarterly profits. A country where we keep pretending trickle-down economics will save us, as if the rich are just one more tax cut away from a sudden attack of generosity.
Zevon saw all this coming—maybe not the specifics, but the spirit of the thing. He knew America likes its myths big and its truths buried under the rug. He knew that if you tell the truth too plainly, people will call you negative—or worse, unpatriotic.
And yet, he kept telling it anyway, with a smirk and a piano and the unshakable conviction that the end was probably near, so you might as well make it rhyme.
In the next hour, we’ll look at how Warren Zevon turned his personal chaos—addiction, heartbreak, fear—into songs that still feel uncomfortably relevant. We’ll talk about masculinity, about the damage men inflict when they’re too proud to ask for help, and about the American habit of applauding the spectacle while ignoring the wreckage.
If you’re looking for easy answers, you won’t find them here. But you might find a little clarity—and a dark, weary laugh—before the credits roll.
This is Warren Zevon’s America. And it’s ours, too. Lucky us.
Like Randy Newman, Warren Zevon was another great American singer-songwriter who often used humor to draw blood while making some pretty powerful commentary on a host of topics. Unlike Newman though, who seems to manage whatever inner deamons might haunt him with finesse, Warren’s often got the best of him.
Like Randy Newman, Zevon’s songs are filled with a host of complex and nearly-literary characters: outlaws,mercenaries, sociopaths, and villains of all stripes. And there was a sound he made - part gravel, part growl, part ghost—and once you’ve heard it, you never quite forgot it. Not pretty. Not smooth. Not polished. But then again, neither was Warren. He once said, “Part of my guitar style is playing loud and out of tune, but spiritedly.” That’s the kind of thing you say when you know what you're doing—and you’re choosing to do it wrong anyway.
Also like Randy, Warren’s lyrics were dangerously funny, and they often made you feel just a little less than comfortable.
Sure, he could write love songs with the best of them. Most of the time, you were pretty sure that things would end just as happily for his lovers as they did for Romeo and Juliet! Warren was often writing with only the thinnest veneer to hide the scarred wood underneath.
Born in Chicago, into a Russian-American family (his father was a Russian émigré, a gambler and a bookie who worked for the mobster Mickey Cohen, and he lived his life mostly on the road.
As you’ll discover today, Warren was a complicated, tortured man who could deliver beauty, but lived in pain – some of the cuts and bruises we experience in childhood never totally heal. Here’s his former wife, Crystal, to share that part of Warren’s story:
A classic mis-match if ever there was one – his mother was a devout Mormon who kept the family together. Zevon grew up mostly in California. In his teens and clearly a musical prodigy, Warren was introduced to Igor Stravinsky - the modernist giant – and was tutored in classical composition and piano by the man who composed The Rite of Spring. The two enjoyed sipping scotch and talking musical scores! Even late in life and a career in rock and roll, Warren never totally abandoned his early interest in classical music either; when he died, he left behind an unfinished symphony that he’d been composing on and off for years.
You can hear it in the deliberate structure of this song, “Desperados Under the Eaves” and in the odd rhythms of “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”, a song that is part war fable, part fever dream. His songs, maliciously funny, were composed with more than instinct. They were carefully composed in a classical sense.
Warren may be one of rock’s most literary writers. He filled his songs with characters that were every bit as unpredictable and bizarre as ones you’d find in the books of Kurt Vonnegut – who gave us ice‑nine inventors, and doodle‑spouting messiahs – or Thomas Pynchon who wrote about rocket‑chasing statisticians, postal‑horn cultists, and a sentient light bulb named Byron the Bulb. Likewise, he didn't just allude to Hemingway and Chandler—he internalized them. Zevon’s musical world was home to werewolves, headless mercenaries, outlaws, junk bond kings, a highly protective rottweiler, a gorilla guilty of grand theft auto, boxers and baseballers mired in controversies, Woodrow Wilson’s guns, and whatever the hell a French inhaler is. And don’t get me started about the clown mobile or the porcelain monkey, and least of all the lecherous, murderous, bathes-himself-in-pot-roast Excitable Boy. His songs often unfold like hardboiled fiction: morally ambiguous, bruised, brilliant. “Carmelita” told the story of a heroin addict and his lonely lover in Echo Park. “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” mocked victimhood with sadistic glee. These were not confessionals—they were character studies, short stories set to melody. "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" turns mercenary folklore into a postcolonial ghost story. "Veracruz" drops the listener into geopolitical commentary about U.S. imperialism.
Veracruz
In this song, from 2002 , his second to last album, My Ride’s Here, the title track gives a massive tip of the hat to some of Warren’s literary heros. Shelley, Keats, Lord Byron, and John Milton gathering for a gunfight.
Some writers pick a particular city or country to tell most of their stories in. Here in America, Faulkner’s stories were mainly set in the decaying South. Steinbeck set his stories in California and Larry McMurtry chose Texas. Warren Zevon, though, cast his nets much further afield. Warren’s eccentric characters lived “in Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine and Berkeley,” not to mention the Congo,Vladivostok, Los Angeles, Collier County Florida, Ovamboland, Sri Lanka, and Denver. At other times, Zevon was happy to escort you into his imagination to visit places like Detox Mansion and Last Breath Farm, Transverse City, and the All-Time Losers Hall of Fame. A host of personalities made unexpected cameos during those musical journeys – everyone from Jesus Christ to John Wayne to Frank and Jesse James to Charlton Heston.
It’s no wonder that Dylan has sung Zevon’s songs on stage for years. Dylan once described Zevon as a favorite songwriter, saying he "straddled the line between heartfelt and primeval" and noting that "there might be three separate songs within a Zevon song but they're all effortlessly connected."
Zevon once described himself, only half-joking, as "the foremost proponent of song noir." The phrase fits. He also once confessed, "I want to write novels, but I don’t have the attention span. So I write three-minute stories with hooks."
Stephen King, a close friend and admirer, once said he regretted never collaborating with Zevon and later dedicated his novel Doctor Sleep to him.
Many of Zevon’s stories were dark. He called his music, ‘song noir’, a nod to the classic black and white 1940’s films known as film noir. Let’s try a few of these on for size.
“Desperados Under the Eaves” was a broken hymn of Hollywood alienation. To read the footnotes in his lyrics is to unearth an archive of references. And in "Desperados Under the Eaves," he crafts a modern-day psalm of Los Angeles despair. Sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, listening to the air conditioner hum, the narrator predicts California will slide into the ocean, but that this cheap motel will somehow remain. It's both sardonic and prophetic. It's the greatest hangover song ever composed.
Don’t the sun look angry through the trees?
Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?
Don’t ya feel like desperados under the eaves?
Heaven help the one who leaves
Still wakin’ up in the morning with shakin’ hands
And I’m tryin’ to find a girl who understands me
But except in dreams you’re never really free
Don’t the sun look angry at me?
The hot Los Angeles sun is a watchful judge bearing down on the derelict Zevon as he stumbles out of an alcoholic haze and into the bright California morning, the walking embodiment of the rundown noir’s main character.
Also on the first album, the stunning, deceptively frigid song, French Inhaler told the story of one of Warren’s failed relationships.
French Inhaler
How you gonna make your way in the world, woman,
when you weren’t cut out for workin’?
When your fingers are slender and frail?
How you gonna get around
in this sleazy bedroom town
if you don’t put yourself up for sale?
In the words of Warren’s son Jordan, the song is a “fuck you” to Marilyn Tule, Jordan’s mother and Warren’s first love. It’s one of Zevon’s greatest songs, with language as fine, and as sharp as the music that carries it, and story as dark and desperate as the relationship it’s about. He was a struggling song-writer, and she was an aspiring actress.
You said you were an actress
Yes, I believe you are
I thought you’d be a star
So I drank up all the money,
Yes, I drank up all the money,
With these phonies in this Hollywood bar,
These friends of mine in this Hollywood bar
As the dream fails, the song ends with a melancholy scene in a Hollywood bar where phonies are the singer’s only friends. And just to bury things once and for all time, he cements things with this lyric:
Loneliness and frustration
We both came down with an acute case
When the lights came up at two
I caught a glimpse of you
And your face looked like
Something Death brought with him in his suitcase
Warren’s career started in the 1960’s. Working as a contract songwriter, Zevon actually wrote a few songs that were recorded by the Turtles – Outside Chance and Like the Seasons. Otherwise, the Turtles biggest song was probably Happy Together.
In this early period, Zevon also released a few singles on his own, as part of a duo called lyme & cybelle. This is one of them, called Follow Me. It went as high as 65 on Billboard’a pop charts.
In ’69, he released a complete album, called Wanted Dead or Alive. It went nowhere - probably deservedly – he just wasn’t ready yet. But, and after that, he became the leader for the Everly Brothers touring band in the early 70’s.
By the fall of ’75, Zevon was sharing a home with Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham and had become good friends with another Southern Californian, Jackson Browne who was, by then just breaking out in a big way. Jackson actually had a lot to do with Warren landing his Asylum records contract and Jackson brought some of his pals in to the studio to help Warren cut his first album – a staggering cast, really: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie - Fleetwood Mac’s rhythm section, the blues guitarist, Bonnie Raitt, Glen Frey and Don Henley from the Eagles, Phil Everly and Linda Ronstadt – a who’s who of mid 70’s rock royalty. How could you miss?
An aside here, but an important one, I think. I think, no matter how much talent somebody has – and this is in music, business, sports, politics… name the career, I think this is true no matter what field you pick – some of our success comes from what we do for ourselves, but a lot happens because our friends are there to slide the paving stones a little closer together so we can make it to our own goal lines. This was for sure the case with Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon. Warren’s wife, Crystal, tells the story:
Here's Waddy Wachtel, Zevon’s guitarist and producer, remembering the recording of Warren’s first album. Titled Warren Zevon, the first album lurches to a start with Poor Poor Pitiful Me, an upbeat track about sadomasochism, with Lindsey Buckingham on backup vocals. The lyrics are indicative of Zevon’s comedic, intelligent, and dark songwriting:
She really worked me over good.
She was a credit to her gender.
She put me through some changes lord
Sort of like a Waring blender.
She asked me if I’d beat her
And she took me back to Hyatt House
I don’t want to talk about it.
Poor poor pitiful me. Whoo!
And while the self-titled album didn’t exactly set the world on fire (it peaked on Billboard at #189), it still did better than “Dead or Alive” had done and his career was on the move. Linda Ronstadt – who by the mid ‘70s was a major star also covered three songs from the album including Poor Poor Pitiful Me, Carmelita, and Mohammed’s Radio.
As literary as he was, he couldn’t help but carve the arc of his life’s story into them – if you know his story, you see it moving from album to album. It’s a coherent narrative of addiction, abuse, regret and redemption. With him, art and artist were not separate. He’s sharing his story of self-inflicted pain and hard-earned joy, giving a little sentimental hygiene, another piece of Zevonian dialect – with – as he put it, “feelings so clean you could eat off them.”
[Waddy on first album. From All Day Vinyl]
And beyond Jackson helping Warren get his contract and first album made, the two wrote some insanely great songs together, such as this song, “Tenderness on the Block”. According to lore, Browne passed out halfway through writing it; Zevon finished the rest while nursing a whiskey. You can hear them both in the song’s mix of world-weariness and fragile hope.
While Jackson breathed tenderness into Zevon’s songs, you can hear Zevon’s sarcasm and irony In other places, Jackson Browne’s songs “Lawyers in Love” and “Lives in the Balance” for example, you’ve got signs of Warren having influenced Jackson toward the darker recesses as much as Jackson nudged Warren to be more sensitive. Both these songs belie the fact that under that ‘cool and got-it-together veneer’, there’s trouble brewing. These songs almost feel like a Hunter S. Thompson dispatch from the underworld –
In 1978, his follow-up album Excitable Boy, included the raccous bar-room favorite, Werewolves of London, finally put Warren Zevon on the map. The album’s title song, Excitable Boy, co-written with Jackson Browne, was a late addition to the album, and written under pressure. Zevon’s guitarist and producer, Waddy Wachtel, told Warren that the album they were in the midst of recording needed more. He said, “Warren, I’m leaving town tomorrow and I’ll be back in two weeks and I need two great songs from you.”
[all day vinyl]
Not many could craft a pop song like this; a horror story masquerading as a pop single—necrophilia, murder, and suburban denial all rolled into one.
Werewolves of London was a joke, written in under half an hour during a vodka-drenched evening with Roy Marinell and Waddy Wachtel. The lyrics were scrawled on cocktail napkins, and the track was nearly abandoned before Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were brought in to tighten it up. It was his career’s biggest hit, but Zevon never forgave the public—or the label—for making it the single. It climbed to #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 but in his view, it permanently skewed how people saw him. "It’s in no way the tip of the iceberg," David Letterman would later remark. "It may be an iceberg next to the iceberg."
The other song Warren wrote under pressure from Wachtel was Lawyers, Guns and Money which also became a classic. Some artists, famously Lennon and McCartney for instance, do their best work under pressure. We saw that in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary a few years ago.
Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight?
Trying to run before she can walk, that's right
She's growing up, she has a young man waiting
Daddy, don't you ask her when she's coming in
And when she's home don't ask her where she's been
She's going out, she has a young man waiting
She's going out, can't keep her young man waiting
She'll be okay, let her have her day
'Cause it's a long way, it's a long walk
But she'll find true love
And tenderness on the block
A little should be said about the relationship that Waddy and Warren shared. If you’re trying to trace the raw, snarling brilliance of Warren Zevon’s sound, you don’t have to go far before you run into Waddy Wachtel. A session legend and one of L.A.’s most in-demand guitarists, Wachtel wasn’t just a sideman—he was Zevon’s sonic co-conspirator. From the propulsive jangle of Excitable Boy to the cinematic grit of Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, Wachtel helped Zevon shape arrangements that felt both dangerous and deliberate. The two men shared a kind of musical telepathy—Wachtel could build menace or melancholy with just a few jagged chords, and Zevon trusted him to do exactly that. Offstage, they shared long nights, hard laughs, and the chaotic volatility of life on the edge, but on record, their partnership grounded Zevon’s wild narratives with a muscular precision. If Zevon brought the stories, Wachtel often provided the teeth. As close as they were, and as productive as the relationship was, Waddy tells about the less than perfect start they had together, here:
[from All Day Vinyl]
Unfortunately, the new found fame and fortune fueled his alcoholism and he could be an angry, nasty drunk. A brilliant songwriter, his live shows could be erratic — a critic noted after a 1978 Boston show, that Zevon was “in his cups”. Zevon spoke candidly about his alcoholism, not with bravado but with bone-dry clarity. "From what I know about alcoholism," he said, "I’d say there’s nothing romantic, nothing grand, nothing heroic, nothing brave—nothing like that about drinking. It’s a real coward’s death." still, his intelligence and ironic humor shone through.
Unfortunately, the new found fame and fortune fueled his alcoholism and he could be an angry, nasty drunk. A brilliant songwriter, his live shows could be erratic — a critic noted after a 1978 Boston show, that Zevon was “in his cups”. Zevon spoke candidly about his alcoholism, not with bravado but with bone-dry clarity. "From what I know about alcoholism," he said, "I’d say there’s nothing romantic, nothing grand, nothing heroic, nothing brave—nothing like that about drinking. It’s a real coward’s death." still, his intelligence and ironic humor shone through.
As great as the songs were, Warren’s drinking was getting out of hand. He was a cult hero. And he was falling apart. Alcohol and addiction consumed him through the ’80s. He disappeared from public view. He blacked out, waved guns around, forgot concerts. Friends left. Relationships crumbled.
This kind of life-style has been part of the musician’s life-style since jazz, and probably before that too. And maybe, if you’re a twenty-something guy getting your first rush of success, and you’re a little bit out of control it’s ok – as long as no one gets hurt. But if you’ve got a family, especially if you’ve got a kid – there are probably wiser choices you could be making. Warren’s son, Jordan talks about what it was like to see his Father like that, here.
[from all day vinyl]
He finally realized he’d hit rock bottom when his wife told him that he’d already been to a Bruce Springsteen concert – an event he had absolutely no memory of – and he entered rehab to sober up. He told a journalist friend, “You’re real lucky if the gorge rises and the self-disgust gets to a sufficient cinematic kind of thing where you know that you’re an asshole.”
[from all day vinyl]
In and out of rehab, losing record deals and picking up new ones, he continued to build his reputation as a formidable song-writer. In the early ‘80s, he connected with REM, sans Michael Stipe the band’s lead singer, and formed a new group called Hindu Love Gods and they released an album called Sentimental Hygiene in ’87. The album also included Bob Dylan whom we recently covered this past February, Neil Young and George Clinton from Funkadelic (check out my episode, The Masters of Funk, episode 3 from season 3 for more on fabulous George Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic mothership!) Eagles drummer, Don Henley, Red Hot Chili Pepper’s bassist, Flea, and Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers lead guitarist, Mike Campbell.
But when he came back, it wasn’t to apologize. It was to write.
Sentimental Hygiene marked his return to form in 1987. But it wasn’t until 2000’s Life’ll Kill Ya that the real reckoning began. This was Zevon at his most naked: aging, sober, and terrified. “My Shit’s Fucked Up” might be the most honest song ever written about a doctor’s appointment.
“Detox Mansion” is from Sentimental Hygiene (1987), which peaked at #63 on Billboard. It’s worth noting that when the album was being made, Bob Dylan appeared unexpectedly at the studio and played harmonica on the fun working-class ditty, “The Factory.” Zevon was absolutely thrilled to host his idol, the man, he said, who had “invented my job.”
On it, “Dextox Mansion” is obviously about his rehab experiences and illuminates his keen sense of humor and also a candid admission: “Well, it’s tough to be somebody. And it’s hard not to fall apart.” The song was born when a friend said to Zevon, “I see you’re drinking Coca-Cola, I guess you don’t want to go back to Detox Mansion?”
Well, I'm gone to Detox Mansion
Way down on Last Breath Farm
I've been rakin' leaves with Liza (Minnelli)
Me and Liz (Taylor) clean up the yard
Now I'm doin' my own laundry
And I'm gettin' those clothes clean
Growin' fond of Detox Mansion
And this quiet life I lead
But I'm just dying to tell my story
For all my friends to read
What goes on in Detox Mansion
Outside the rubber room
We get therapy and lectures
We play golf in the afternoon
Also, the title track, “Sentimental Hygiene” is from the record of the same name. This 1987 “comeback” album featured numerous guest stars including Bob Dylan, , and most members of REM (Zevon’s core recording band). Six singles were released, not one charted.
This song, the title track from “Sentimental Hygiene” is a gorgeously written song about conflict, fatigue, and desperation. Neil Young’s luminescent guitar solo lifts it to a higher plane, too.
Every day I get up in the morning and go to work
And my job – whatever
I need some Sentimental Hygiene
Everybody’s at war these days
Let’s have a mini surrender
I need some Sentimental Hygiene
Everybody’s had to hurt about it
No on wants to live without it
It’s not so hard to find it
Every night I come home exhausted
From trying to get along
I need some Sentimental Hygiene.
In ’88, Warren and the Hindu Love Gods released a second album – a collection of covers – and the year after, Zevon released Transverse City, an ambitious concept album about a world in collapse. My favorite songs on that album are Run Straight Down, first, because none other than David Gilmour from Pink Floyd wails on lead guitar on that song, and secondly because I’m not aware of any other songs that use the words four, aminobiphenyl, hexachlorobenzene
Dimethyl sulfate, chloromethyl methylether
Two, three, seven, eight, tetrachlorodibenzo-
Para-dioxin, carbon disulfide It’s a song about our environmental degradation.
Another standout track in an album full of great songs, this one, Splendid Isolation, also featured Mike Campbell from Tom Petty’s band, the Heart Breakers. It’s a song about retreat. About pulling back from a world that feels exhausting or absurd. Zevon taps into something a lot of people secretly fantasize about: disappearing, locking the door, and not answering to anyone. Short of being an actual manifesto, it’s still pretty close. Zevon imagines himself barricaded away from civilization—no press, no parties, no expectations. Just the silence of self-imposed exile. Some context might help -
The song came in 1989 on Transverse City, at the tail end of the Cold War and the start of a new era of overexposure—24-hour news, paparazzi culture, and rising digital connectedness.
Even in that pre-internet/ pre-social media world (you know, the good old days!) Zevon was suspicious of the rising pressure to be ‘on.’ It’s like he was predicting how the internet has, by now, turned everyone into a brand. It’s like he knew that someday we’d all be desperate to unplug.
And because it’s Warren, there are some great lyrics that show off his dark, fatalistic sense of humor, like the line where he namedrops the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Zevon says, “Michael Jackson in Disneyland / Don’t have to share it with nobody else.’
“In a world that keeps getting louder, Splendid Isolation feels like a hymn to disappearing—at least until we can stand to come back.”
Even with some pretty major star-power on it, including Jerry Garcia and David Gilmour, of course the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd respectively, the album didn’t sell and Zevon was – once again – a rocker without a label.
Enter Warren’s pal, David Letterman, to his rescue. “Dave” made Zevon a friend of the show, frequent guest, and regular fill-in on those occasions when Paul Shaffer was unavailable to lead the band. This shot in the arm gave Warren the kick needed to ink a new deal with the independent label Artemis Records and several more albums followed; Life'll Kill Ya, in 2000 and My Ride's Here – an album which paired Zevon with none other than the satiric novelists Hunter S.Thompson, and Charles Hiassen and the Irish poet Paul Muldoon.
From Life’ll Kill Ya, this song, “I Was In The House When The House Burned Down” was the album’s first single. This song should have been on every station in the world at the time, but it wasn’t. It’s got everything that made Warren, Warren. Self-aware Zevon wit. Foot-stomping drumming. A kickass harmonica - Turn it up!
I had the shit till it all got smoked
I kept the promise till the vow got broke
I had to drink from the lovin' cup
I stood on the banks till the river rose up
I saw the bride in her wedding gown
I was in the house when the house burned down
I may be old and I may be bent
But I had the money till it all got spent
I had the money till they made me pay
Then I had the sense to be on my way
I had to stay in the underground
I was in the house when the house burned down
I met the man with the thorny crown
I helped Him carry his cross through town
I was in the house when the house burned down
And also from the same album, this song – “For My Next Trick I’ll Need A Volunteer” is a classic Zevon piano song with his quintessential dark humor wordplay. Painfully funny, macabre, melancholic, metaphoric, and – ok - self-pitying. It also one of his most underappreciated and least discussed songs.
I can saw a woman in two
But you won't want to look in the box when I do
I can make love disappear
For my next trick I'll need a volunteer
I can pull a rabbit out of a hat
I can pull it out but I can't put it back
I can make love disappear
For my next trick I'll need a volunteer
It's lonely up here
When the tricks have been played
And the spotlights have faded
And the plans that we made
Have fallen apart
It's lonely as hell
And there's no magic spell
For a broken heart
And then, just when it looked like things might finally be falling into place for Warren Zevon, he got the biggest blow of all; a diagnosis of peritoneal mesothelioma – a form of lung cancer that frequently comes from inhaling asbestos. Inoperable. Terminal. After a brief detour into more drinking – but you know, no one gets to hide from death – he assembled a group of luminary rocker friends – including Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Dwight Yoakam, Ry Cooder, Emmy Lou Harris and Don Henley to record his final album, the Wind.
“Disorder in the House,” with Springsteen on guitar, is a roaring send-off—funny, furious, alive. Springsteen didn’t just show up; he tore the roof off. After Zevon died, Springsteen played “My Ride’s Here” in tribute and called Zevon “one of the great, great American songwriters.”
But the heart of The Wind is “Keep Me in Your Heart.” A lullaby, a farewell, a whisper.
“Hold me in your thoughts
Take me to your dreams
Touch me as I fall into view.”
There’s no joke. No snarl. Just love.
Warren Zevon didn’t clean up his legacy. He didn’t rewrite the story. He just added one final, perfect verse.
And once more, his friend David Letterman had him on the show for one more evening – a night with no other guests; the entire evening devoted to Warren. Warren appeared on October 30, playing his songs, discussing his life and his health.
[last letterman]
For Letterman, Zevon wasn’t just a musical guest — he was a friend and fixture, someone who frequently filled in for Paul Shaffer as bandleader on Shaffer’s off-nights, and who felt like part of the show's DNA. Their 20-year relationship culminated in Zevon’s unforgettable 2002 Late Show appearance, a final public act of grace and gallows humor as he stared terminal cancer in the face. He played three songs, joked about mortality, and dropped what would become his most quoted line: “Enjoy every sandwich.” Zevon knew how to say goodbye. “Dave’s the best friend my music ever had,” he told Letterman’s audience that night, a sentiment that still brings Dave to tears when he recalls it. Upstairs after the show, Zevon handed him his guitar, and Letterman says he just broke down, sobbing uncontrollably. “It was a cinematic story… I can’t watch it again.”
Paul Shaffer remembered the rehearsal:
“We had a rehearsal, and Warren was feeling good. Even though I said, ‘Warren, just try to mark it and don’t blow your voice,’ he couldn’t help it. It was so much fun playing. Then that night, he was clearly tired but totally focused. He went out there and did something incredibly brave and generous, sharing that moment with everyone. It was transcendent.”
After the show, Letterman recalled:
“We’re making small talk backstage, just talking, and Warren is taking his guitar—he had brought it in a case—he's taking the strap and he's coiling it up. He puts it in the case and he snaps the case shut. Then he says to me, ‘Here. I want you to have this. Take care of it.’ I just started sobbing. That guitar, he’d played it on our show for twenty years. And now it was in my hands. It was the most deeply human moment I’ve ever experienced on that show.”
The lasting image of that evening, though, is of Zevon on the couch that final night, talking plainly about death with elegance, wit, and composure. “Here’s a guy dying, and he’s on a late-night talk show… talking about the end of his life,” Letterman says. “The human spirit is infinite. It was confirmation of that for me.”
In an interview, Warren’s ex-wife, Crystal, said, Zevon was always philosophically inclined, searching for meaning and artistry in life’s struggles. He once mused about his obituary, joking that it would begin with the iconic howl from his hit: “Ow-oooh.” And yet, he hoped his deeper works would also be remembered — songs that were, as he put it, “personal... but I don’t know any other way of doing it.”
He lived long enough to see the album’s release, and the birth of his twin grandsons. Five
months after his death in 2003, the Grammy’s awarded him posthumously for Best
Contemporary Folk Album and Best Rock Duo Performance (for "Disorder in the House" with
Bruce Springsteen).
Gone 22 years now, Warren is still waiting for his seat in the Rock Hall of Fame and for one, Letterman wonders why. , one of Warren Zevon’s most consistent champions, still can’t wrap his head around why his friend hasn’t been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The impact he made on the music world was felt in all the right places. When the word was out that Warren was sick, Dylan – a long-time admirer, and that’s saying a lot - paid tribute by incorporating his songs into his live shows. During the fall 2002 tour, Dylan played “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” “Accidently Like a Martyr,” “Mutineer,” and “Boom Boom Mancini”.
Two days after Zevon died and just before his touching rendition of “My Ride’s Here,” Springsteen told his Toronto audience: “Warren was one of the great, great American songwriters and we’re going to miss him very much.”
Zevon’s final album, The Wind, recorded while he was dying, is a triumphant, harrowing farewell. Surrounded by longtime friends like Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, Ry Cooder, and Tom Petty, Zevon delivered one last gut punch to the world. It ends with “Keep Me in Your Heart,” a song so emotionally direct it bypasses irony altogether:
When Letterman received the Mark Twain prize in 2022, another friend of his, Eddy Vedder was on hand to perform the song – a tribute to both Warren, and Dave.
“Shadows are falling and I’m running out of breath / Keep me in your heart for a while.” Stunningly beautiful, this ultimately heartbreaking song with its sometimes breaking vocals, restrained strumming, and fragile, delicate drumming of the legendary Jim Keltner are a lesson in how to devastate with a light touch. But after all, it was Warren himself who once wrote in his diary, “You don’t have to firebomb Dresden to prove you can fly a plane.”
I’d have loved to have been the fly on the wall the first time his ex-wife heard the lyrcis still meant for her when he sang,
“Sometimes when you’re doin’ 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.”
Shadows are fallin' and I'm runnin' 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
Hold me in your thoughts
Take me to your dreams
Touch me as I fall into view
When the winter comes
Keep the fires lit
And I will be right next to you
He lived seven months past his diagnosis, long enough to meet his grandchildren and see the album released.
This song, “Disorder In The House” was the first single released from this last album, The Wind. After better than 20 years, this was Warren’s highest achievement and while this song didn’t chart, it’s still got everything needed to make you turn it up to eleven!
Disorder in the house
The tub runneth over
Plaster's falling down in pieces by the couch of pain
Time to duck and cover
Helicopters hover over rough terrain
Reptile wisdom
Zombies on the lawn staggering around
It's a fate worse than fame
Even the Lhasa Apso seems to be ashamed
The doors are coming off the hinges
The earth will open and swallow up the real estate
Through it all, Zevon was, above all else, honest. He sang about pain, dysfunction, addiction, and death without apology. In the end, Zevon’s legacy is not one of awards or record sales—it’s one of fiercely loyal fans, grateful collaborators, and songs that refuse to grow old. He wrote about the worst in people with the compassion of someone who’d been there himself. He dared to be both grotesque and graceful. He made us laugh and broke our hearts—sometimes in the same verse. And as long as there are listeners willing to go beyond “Werewolves of London” and dig into the strange, haunted, brilliant world of Warren Zevon, he’ll never be forgotten.
Before we close today’s episode, I also want to take a minute to consider what Warren’s story can teach us in this moment of division, uncertainty, and change.
He spent years fighting his own demons—addiction, regret, self-destruction. But in the end, he faced the truth of his life with a kind of radical honesty, and even a sense of humor. That’s something we could all use more of right now.
Warren knew his time was running out, and this was when he dug down deep and got real. He looked David Letterman in the eye and gave us the simplest, truest advice:
“Enjoy every sandwich.”
In a world that feels unstable—where climate change, political division, and mistrust weigh heavy—maybe that’s the most powerful act of defiance: to find gratitude in the small things, to speak honestly about what’s broken, and to keep showing up to make something better, even when it feels hopeless.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “Give thanks in all circumstances,” and it feels impossible sometimes—but it’s exactly what Zevon tried to do.
So if you’re struggling to make sense of everything, remember this: you don’t have to fix the whole world today. Start by telling the truth. Start by finding something worth loving. Start by savoring the ordinary moments we’re given.
As Viktor Frankl said, “When you know your why, you can endure any how.”
This is Joe Hines for American Song. Stay Strong. Fight the good fight. Keep your eyes on the prize. Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next time.