![]() ![]() The circumstances in which it was written and recorded turn El Amor de Mi Vida from a straightforward song ruefully reflecting on a lost love into an oddly invasive experience. Nevertheless, its curiously unassuming nature lends the album an unsettling power that all the weighty pronouncements in the world could not match.ĭespite the all-star supporting cast - including Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, The Eagles' Don Henley and Emmylou Harris - it is musically and lyrically understated, and frequently suffused with an almost unbearable poignancy. "If I can let someone know what I felt about them," he said in an interview earlier this year, "that's more important than passing off some bullshit insight I've had about living on the planet." You suspect that if Zevon had attempted to do the latter, critics - particularly in the US, where the album was released shortly before Zevon's death - would still have acclaimed The Wind as a masterpiece. Before his death, Zevon was open about his reasons for making the album. Then again, objectivity does not seem to be the point of The Wind. It is, of course, virtually impossible to be objective about the musical last-will-and-testament of an artist who died only five days ago. His rhetoric was clever enough to earn him the tag of "the songwriter's songwriter", but it hardly seemed the ideal style with which to tackle the subject of imminent death. In addition, Zevon's speciality was flippant, sardonic wordplay and a kind of ironic detachment. His most recent anthology boasted the title I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. His oeuvre was studded with titles such as Life'll Kill Ya and Don't Let Us Get Sick. For most of his career, Zevon seemed preoccupied with illness and death. So the news that American singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, who was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August 2002, had chosen to make a farewell album was greeted with understandable curiosity. George Harrison's final album, Brainwashed, saw the quiet Beatle largely avoid the subject of his mortality, before signing off with a rather grumpy title track on which the pet subject of unfair taxation made a final appearance. Queen's Innuendo had Freddie Mercury Judy Garlanding his way to the grave, coming up with songs called things like The Show Must Go On. The two major examples to date featured terminally ill superstars playing to type. ![]() However, actual musical epitaphs - albums made by artists who know they are going to die - are a rare occurrence.
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