Top Ten Warren Zevon Songs: Dirty Life and Times (#9)

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In addition to country music legend Merle Haggard, I'm also counting down my ten favorite Warren Zevon songs. I know that sounds like an odd combination, but maybe this song will change your mind about that. #9: Dirty Life and Times This song features Dwight Yoakam on harmonies! Yoakam first sang on Zevon's song "Heartache Spoken Here" on the 1991 masterpiece Mr. Bad Example. Zevon had a small role in South of Heaven, West of Hell, an ill-fated movie that Yoakam wrote, directed, and starred in (so the atrocity is all on him! ). This song opens The Wind, the album Zevon made after being diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma. Despite the ominous opening line (one of my favorite lines of his), "Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me," Zevon actually wrote this before he was given the fatal diagnosis. This is more about a man confessing he's hardly been a saint and realizing that, as he's getting older, it's harder to find forgiveness in people in general and a lover in particular. And, even though he's admitting how bad he's been and how difficult that's making true love ("it's hard to find a girl with a heart of gold when you're living in a four-letter world"), this is hardly a song of contrition: "I'm looking for a woman with low self-esteem who'll lay me down and ease my worried mind." He's not particular, either: "If she won't love me then her sister will." Zevon's biography is subtitled The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon after this song. Dirty Life and Times Written by Warren Zevon From The Wind, 2003