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Musings On Mortality, Song Noir, Religion In His Music And The King Of Rock N' Roll
Warren Zevon
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One over the years you've written more than your fair shares of song about guns and violence
Plenty of songs about outlaws and espionage
Uh, your one time producer Jackson Brown called your genre song war
Is it a dark fatalistic notion that life will kill you?
No I don't think it's, I mean the fact that life will kill you
Is just that, it's a fact
I don't think album is about aging issues
To me, it's not about aging
Because eh, I'm also lucky that I've had kids since I was a kid
So I've always been papa, in a way a five years old, I've always been twenty-four
So I don't think of myself in terms of oh-oh, I turn the corner
And now I'm old
Michael Cain said the other day, I don't think I'm middle aged
I don't know any body other than six
So I don't think that's the issue
To me this song is more about being dead
I think you have to spend fair amount realizing that you will be
So you remember to enjoy everything you possibly can every minute you're not
You always wanna try and tell younger people that
Which is very difficult because they don't really hear it
Because they feel your life is being imposed on and of course they are absolutely correct
Still wanna tell them, hey we having a lot of fun
It's all good is Snoop doggy Dogg and my father used to say this all good
I'm surprised you say this isn't an album about aging
It seems to me that the thoughts of your own mortality bother you more now than when you sang I'll sleep when I'm dead
No they didn't bother me then,they don't bother me now
It's just as true now, I guess it's true or is it?
You know what when Jackson said that about sang war
I know his means it as a compliment
And he means it in the style of
In the sense of those 40s Los Angeles kinda tough guy detective story writers that I've never ever until I compared to
But I don't really think of my songs as particularly vile
I guess my favourite out of all these assholes he was born violin 2,500 years ago
Then anything on cable TV now
So is Shakespeare all the time real vile we're really real vile in every sense
I just think that popular music as we understood it for a long time was limited to a kind of limited songs
People wrote songs about a certain thing love songs for the most part
Rogers and I wrote a great love song and jady southern roll writes great loves songs and it wasn't exactly what I was doing
Life will kill you isn't the first time you sang about karma and reincarnation your songs I've always had religious allusions from eh mohammed's radio to the new song our cells to know when you brought up with certain religious beliefs that creep into your lyrics
Yeah I was, I was eh brought up with religious beliefs Christian religious beliefs but, you know it's one of life's great touches and I don't like talking about it in the, I don't like talking about it more than I do in my songs in public
Well take another tact then cause perhaps the ultimate Christlike metaphor and cautionary tale for those who've had fame and fortune is the life of Elvis Presley you wrote about Elvis before in Jesus mention and I'm thinking he's the inspiration for porsolen monkey
Yeah porsolen monkey is hard to deny I was writing a song with one of my oldest best friend and most frequent collaborators called Hank colada Ron and we were working on a different song actually a kind of violent and terrible song, too terrible to talk about now and I noticed that on his song writing note book as we sat on the sofa suffering in my apartment working,he had a post card turned out to be from Graceland of the TV room the porsolen monkey sitting on the coffee table yunno the onixize and yunno that inspired us and then we had to spend the next week or two writing the song
Hardey and I talk all the time almost everyday I called Hardey last night and his daughter, his grown daughter was there and he wasn't and she said yunno a friend of mine just came from a trip to Memphis and she said to me when I went to Graceland yeah and the most striking thing I saw in the whole place was this porcelain monkey
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