It’s sexy too.īut the most overlooked jewel on that fatal crown is 2002’s My Ride’s Here.Īside from his signature wordplay and all its radio-friendly hooks, My Ride’s Here features collaborations with an eclectic group of literary friends who shared Zevon’s irreverent world-view-and also didn’t mind poking fun at the Angel of Death. The title track is one of my all-time favorites by Warren or anybody else. Written with Pulitzer-Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, it’s the only hearse-themed pop song that rhymes the hotel Westin with Charlton Heston. It also features cameos from Lord Byron, Shelley, Keats, John Wayne, and Jesus Christ.
In the song Warren tells Chuck Heston that he’d love to stick around and live this beautiful life, but he accepts that it’s his time to catch his ride to meet his maker. Check out Bruce Springsteen’s live cover on The Zevon tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich.) (The track was written and released before he received his own real life death sentence. The two enigmatic wordsmiths, Zevon and Muldoon, carry on their merriment with “Macgillycuddy’s Reeks,” gleefully dancing between the downward chart of a lovesick patient and a failed dot-com merger. The album’s infectious, cheerful spirit continues with “Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song).” Cowritten with sports columnist and best-selling author Mitch Albom, “Hit Somebody!” transforms a tale of a hockey goon named “Buddy” into a wistful ballad. The track rocks with a feel-good, sing-along sound tucked under a bleak refrain: What else can a farm boy from Canada do? Since it features a cameo from friend David Letterman shouting “Hit Somebody!” it could be dismissed as a novelty track if Buddy’s story wasn’t told with such poignancy. Zevon waltzes you through this good-hearted goon’s entire life in five-and-a-half rocking and rollicking minutes.
Turning to Miami Herald writer and novelist Carl Hiaasen, Zevon gives us the hand-clapping ditty “Basket Case,” about “a bipolar mama in leather and lace.” Apparently it was written for Hiassen’s book of the same name. It rides in on a fuzzy guitar before detouring through a Baroque interlude that Zevon pulls off like a musical Houdini.Īlthough he rounds out his literary tour with the paranoid “You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared,” cowritten by the sometimes paranoid (and always brilliant) Hunter S. Thompson, not every track on My Ride’s Here is a literary collaboration.
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