Warren Zevon

Warren Zevon's first Asylum album is a contemporary comedy-western about Los Angeles.
In images that are often mordantly funny and detailed right down to specific place-names,
Zevon compiles a surrealistic vision of Hollywood that is one part Howard Hawks to three
parts Nathanael West. Albums with a Hollywood-western theme aren't new. But all the
others have been made by die-hard romantics -- the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Jo... More >

I am suspicious of singer-songwriters who draw attention to phrases like "hasten down the wind," and I would suggest a moratorium on songs about the James Brothers that don't also rhyme "pollution" and "solution." But I like the way Zevon resists pigeonholes like "country-rock" while avoiding both the banal and the mystagogical, and I like quatrains like: "And if California slides into the ocean/Like the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing/Until I pay my bill." (Grade: B+)