Published
The Wind
The Wind is the twelfth and final studio album by American singer-songwriter Warren Zevon. The album was released on August 26, 2003, by Artemis Records. Zevon began recording the album shortly after he was diagnosed with inoperable pleural mesothelioma (a cancer of the lining of the lung), and it was released just two weeks before his death on September 7, 2003.
Upon learning of his cancer diagnosis, Zevon became determined to record a final studio album. For this, Zevon entrusted his long time friend Jorge Calderón to help produce and write the album with him; and ensure it would be seen to completion. Zevon’s record label gave him a large budget to record, and he got assistance from high-profile friends such as Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and Billy Bob Thornton. Zevon was also joined by his son Jordan Zevon as a backing vocalist on the album. Zevon was inspired to include a Bob Dylan cover after Dylan performed several of his songs in concert in 2002.
Calderón would often struggle with Zevon during the recording process, as his terminal diagnosis had caused Zevon to relapse into alcoholism and suffer regular bouts of depression causing him to sometimes disappear for several days at a time.
Calderón viewed the album’s creation as giving Zevon a purpose to live for and encouraged Zevon to continue working on the album, while Zevon would also note his desire to complete the album and live long enough to see his grandchildren born. Lyrics often took inspiration from frequent conversations and phone calls between the two, for example Zevon once described on a phone call to Calderón his prescription pills as leaving him feeling “as numb as a statue” which lead to a song of the same title. The “davenport of despair” mentioned in “Disorder in the House” was a reference to the couch in Zevon’s home that Calderón and Zevon had nicknamed “the couch of pain” and the “divan of despair” while first working on lyrics for Mr. Bad Example and subsequent albums on the couch prior to The Wind. Other lyrics in the song referenced the recent war on terror.
As Zevon’s cancer worsened during the production of the album, Calderón would frequently push for Zevon to record “Keep Me in Your Heart” a song which Zevon had begun writing shortly after his diagnosis. Following the birth of his twin grandsons, Zevon would be joined by his daughter Ariel and Calderón who would prop him up on his couch to record the finished “Keep Me in Your Heart” as the final track of the album on April 12, 2003.
The record was regarded by Robert Christgau as “one of those nearness-of-death albums”, along with Mississippi John Hurt’s Last Sessions (1972), Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (1997), Warren Zevon’s The Wind (2003), and Johnny Cash’s American VI: Ain’t No Grave (2010).