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I remember the first time I heard the title track for the album “Excitable Boy”. “He dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones…” I’d be happy to hear what you find in it! It’s about enjoying myself in the here and now because I just don’t know what’s hanging around my kitchen door… What does it mean to you? I can’t know – but I bet you already love the song. It’s about embracing that which I fear – even seeing it as attractive, with perfect hair and fine clothes. They didn’t write it that way, it came out that way! As well though, that meaning is right up our alley for this blog.įor me, it’s about laughing in the face of death. The song was clearly never intended to be *meaningful*, and yet, it is. First, it’s a perfect illustration of what I was talking about in the introduction.
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I don’t include “Werewolves” here because of its popularity, but for two other reasons. They had the title, a lick from Roy, and they just let loose. We did it as spontaneously as could be, and look what happened.” Roy Marinell, Warren, and Waddy Wachtel had equal parts in creating it, and Roy notes: “Werewolves” was literally a fifteen-minute song that none of us took seriously. The stories of its creation all jibe among those involved and can be found in detail in Warren’s biography. It’s become one of the great songs of Rock and Roll. The biggest hit from the album, “Werewolves of London”, was written in fun and would have been lost but for Crystal Zevon recognizing its quality and writing it down. They’re our subject for the rest of this post. Several of them clearly fall within the range of what we talk about in this blog. In 1978 Warren’s third album, Excitable Boy, met with great success and many of the songs on it are those his fans will carry with them until they die. It may be in the end that, for us today at least, such is true for the traditional ballads we love as well. Reflections change like everything and we need songs that speak to us repeating in our lives because we can find the meaning we need in them when we need it. The significance comes from the way the song, lyrics and music as a whole, reflects our own depths, socially and personally.
It’s possible to access their power without dissecting the lyrics for specific meaning. So I don’t think it’s foolish to look for something deeper in these songs, though the tools one needs are not necessarily those that folklorists use with traditional ballads. And many of his oldest songs stayed in his live repertoire throughout his career. But of all the things folks said about Warren Zevon, no one ever said his energy was fake in performance quite the opposite, as I can attest to personally. I suppose one can never go on tour, or fake it on stage to rake in the royalties. The singer-songwriter may not be conscious of what’s coming through him or her in the act of creation, but s/he lives with that work of art and recreates it with every performance. Now, we’ve seen the same idea with some of the other contemporary artists we’ve considered in this blog – though they say it less humorously – ‘The song came through me, I don’t know what it means.’ Indeed, this may convince you that plumbing these contemporary ballads for meaning is a fool’s errand. And I said, “What? What’s so funny?” He said, “That’s exactly how I feel when people ask me what those lyrics mean.” He said, “You know, when I write something, I’m thinking, ‘I wonder what I look like wearing this hat.’” I thought, ‘I hope I look good in this hat.’” And Warren burst out laughing, walking around in circles laughing, hysterical. down 30–40 percent, and I said, “I remember exactly what I was thinking. I always thought wearing a hat knocked my I.Q. I had this fedora, this Borsalino, on, and I had this thing with hats. “I literally, absolutely did remember what I was thinking. He asked Michael what he was thinking as he was acting at one particular point in that scene.
Warren zevon excitable boy movie#
Warren was talking to actor Michael Ironside about a scene in the movie Jo Jo Dancer that Warren found particularly intense. Even when he first had a concept about which he wanted to write, it seems the words most often spilled out of him intuitively before he applied his craftsman’s tools to edit.Ī story from I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead illustrates the upshot of that. The approach seems to have worked when writing with others as well. It’s not clear to me that any of Warren’s lyrics have a totally static intentional meaning.Īt several points in his biography, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (well worth the money, and available on Kindle), it *is clear* that Warren often began writing a song fluidly, from his creative center – ‘listening to his muse’ as it were. In our opening post this week on Warren Zevon, I was careful while interpreting the lyrics to point out that the readings were mine.