Warren Zevon likely would have appreciated the irony of an artist completing a fearless look at the finite nature of life not long before receiving a terminal diagnosis, at least if he hadn’t been the one whom this fate befell. Here was a guy who made a career out of the ebb, the underbelly, the hangover. Why wouldn’t death’s quirky sense of humor factor into his story before all was said and done?
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Life’ll Kill Ya, released 25 years ago this month, featured Zevon rising from career depths to stare down the dwindling years with equal parts defiance and tenderness. It was all too prophetic at the time. But it now stands as a musical how-to for folks of all ages and conditions confronting the borrowed time of it all.
A Career on Hold
He was always a cult artist, even when his strange tales of mayhem and debauchery trickled their way into the mainstream. But by the late ’90s, Warren Zevon’s cult had either diminished or just refused to make their presence known. Without a record label as he entered his 50s, the prognosis for a career resurgence was poor.
By his own admittance, his laziness prevented him from accumulating too much material after his 1995 album Mutineer. But Zevon eventually cobbled together a set of songs that he recorded at his home studios with a few collaborators (guitarist and occasional co-songwriter Jorge Calderon and percussionist Winston Watson), sticking to spare, unfussy arrangements.
Zevon’s self-destructive tendencies often waylaid his career momentum. On the flip side, he also had a few renowned fans who often helped him resuscitate his career. In this case, it was his old buddy Jackson Browne, who heard the songs and insisted Zevon had something great on his hands.
Browne connected Zevon with Danny Goldberg, who was firing up a label known as Artemis Records around that time. Goldberg signed Zevon, and Life’ll Kill Ya hit shelves in January 2000. Those who might have forgotten about Zevon’s immense talent were reminded by this brilliant LP.
Sadly, Zevon would have to put the album’s wisdom about going into that good night to practice two years later, when he was diagnosed with cancer. He squeezed out two more wonderful albums before ultimately succumbing to the disease in 2003.
Remembering the Music of Life’ll Kill Ya
Life’ll Kill Ya is anything but a downer, because Zevon was far too funny for that. It’s not exactly uplifting either, because he’d never sugarcoat anything. But it’s always honest, and that’s a quality that this artist always could be counted on to deliver, even if it meant that his work would never be quite appreciated by the masses as much it deserved. (Hey, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, are your ears burning?)
“I Was in the House When the House Burned Down” starts the album out in rip-roaring fashion, as Zevon suggests that sucking the marrow out of life engenders both thrills and consequences. He sardonically muses on Elvis Presley’s late-life unraveling on “Porcelain Monkey,” and digs with deep regret into his romantic misadventures on the biting allegory “For My Next Trick, I’ll Need a Volunteer” and the folk-rocking “I’ll Slow You Down.”
As the album progresses, it shifts from retrospection to glimpse the diminishing future. A cover of “Back in the High Life” reveals melancholic undertones unheard on Steve Winwood’s original. “My S–t’s F–ked Up” hilariously and profanely details late-life’s aches, pains, and more serious health calamities. And then, just when you’re waiting on another round of one-liners, Zevon gently intones the prayer “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” and tiptoes all over your heartstrings.
Perhaps nobody in the singer/songwriter genre ever could flip the switch on us from rolling in the aisles to drowning in our tears like Warren Zevon. Life’ll Kill Ya epitomizes that singular talent as well as any of his albums. The context of the album’s message was wrested from his hands by his subsequent illness and death. But what other artist could have delivered that crucial, universally relevant message so truthfully?
Photo by Hayley Madden/Redferns
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