The Heart Gets Harder

I've been told often I'm much too young to love Warren the way I do. Or, for that matter, to even know who he was. I can see their point. I was four when Warren Zevon died in 2003. Yet for me, he's been such a guiding light through growing up. The man who makes me howl whenever I'm going through Soho, but also the comfort I turn to, inevitably, at times when I'm feeling lost or sorrowful.

Miro. What else.

Warren, who was taught briefly under another beloved musician, Igor Stravinsky. It seems so many of the people that I love, him, Dylan, Roger Waters, all circle me back to that brilliant Russian visionary. Well, maybe there'll be a #threetunetuesday post someday about Mr. Stravinsky, but for now, it's Warren. Inevitably.

Find myself smiling at the sexy cheekiness of Poor Poor Pitiful Me while waiting for the light to turn green.

I met a girl at the Rainbow Bar
She asked me if I'd beat her
She took me back to the Hyatt House
I don't want to talk about it

It seems particularly important, in times when life seems heavy, to seek out those people who make it more beautiful, and for me, Warren has always been one of those people. Last year, on my last day in Barcelona, I decided on a whim to tattoo his "Enjoy Every Sandwich" quote on my ribcage. It's a small enough tattoo, and one I might not have considered when I was younger. Yet it seems to me a message becoming more and more salient the longer I live.

Famously, when asked in an interview what he'd learned about his shocking cancer diagnosis (in his 50s, not long after making a musical comeback), Warren lightly replied it had taught him to enjoy every sandwich. Not always evident or easiest to remember.

I love his Preludes as it's full of gems like this one. This, to me, is his best version of Hasten Down the Wind. It's filled with such sorrow. It was also, arguably, the song that shot him to fame when Linda Ronstadt covered it.

She's so many women
He can't find the one who was his friend
So he's hanging on to half a heart
But he can't have the restless part
So he tells her to hasten down the wind

I've always thought this song encapsulates perfectly the ease with which people drift apart. And we think that's not gonna happen, that their existence in our lives is going to be forever, a certainty. Except not really. We lose touch and turn into different people without the other quite noticing, and by the time they do, it's too late, we're strangers.

I could've easily taken the version off Preludes for this, also, but this concert above is one of my favorite live performances of music ever recorded and it'd be a shame not to include it.

We made mad love, shadow love
Random love and abandoned love
(Ooh) Accidentally like a martyr
The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder

It does. That lyric's been particularly heavy on my mind this past week. It's not so much that you don't survive terrible things, but just the perverting of your heart, and the alteration, the cognitive dissonance between trying to move through life in the same way you used to while being forever altered, no longer capable, that's just. It floors me right now.

There's so much amazing Zevon to choose from, really. A lot of happy Zevon, too. Songs like Hit Somebody, Lawyers, Guns and Money are music to put you right way up again. For now, for me, though, I'm gonna go with another sad one. Sorry.

Taking its name from the first song in this selection (appropriately, from his first proper album), Zevon entitled his final, post-diagnosis album The Wind. It's an incredible reflection of a man staring down death at an unfair age. All of it is shattering. I can't listen to Keep Me in Your Heart without bawling. And while many many people have covered Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door, the way Warren begs "Open up, open up, open up" towards the end, against the chorus, as a man on the cusp of death, to me is out of this world.

Alternate translations insist he's singing "Hoping I'm, hoping I'm, hoping I'm". Me, I still favor the first one, but either is gut-wrenching, really.

It's worth adding, also, that during 2002 and 2003, when it was publicly known Warren was dying, Bob Dylan almost always closed his shows at the time by covering 2-3 Zevon songs. From one fantastic story-teller to another, I guess.

So I guess I'm going oldie for my #threetunetuesday picks this week. And a bit dark. Hopefully next week will be a happier, lighter selection.