Warren Zevon: My Ride's Here

Warren Zevon is capable of penning picaresque story-songs so packed with memorable characters and witty descriptive details that they reveal new depths of insight with each spin. But at times, he relies too readily on his facility for punchlines, forgetting that even the funniest joke loses a good deal of its humor after it's been heard once. The most immediately striking song on Zevon's new album My Ride's Here is a collaboration with sportswriter Mitch Albom: "Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)" has a catchy, everybody-join-in ballad structure, and a fleshed-out story about a man paid to play the enforcer on a hockey team. Albom and Zevon fill the lyrics with vivid sports-world particulars—references to nationality and Rocket Richard, exciting hockey play-by-play—but though "Hit Somebody!" is amusing the first time through, it doesn't exactly demand a replay. The addition of David Letterman hollering the title over the chorus proves to be one clever touch too many, as Zevon lets the comic atmosphere overwhelm the song. In addition to working with Albom, Zevon co-wrote seven of the 10 tracks on My Ride's Here, hooking up with Carl Hiaasen and Hunter S. Thompson along the way. Of the celebrity-aided compositions, only Thompson's "You're A Whole Different Person When You're Scared" really works, mainly because the singer's sinister mumble and the creepy lyric are in the vein of such classic Zevon paranoid-sleazebag songs as "Lawyers, Guns And Money" and "Mr. Bad Example." (Only Zevon would interrupt a dark tale of torture with the line, "The eagle screams on Friday / The Colts are doomed this year.") Cuts written with Paul Muldoon and Larry Klein hang together better, especially the NASDAQ-foiled romance narrative "Macgillycuddy's Reeks" (which has a shanty-like Irish lilt) and the inquiry into intellect and its effect on women in "Genius." For all My Ride's Here's inconsistency, it's blessed by Zevon, who retains one of the most distinctive and appealing vocal/lyrical cadences in rock 'n' roll. All the half-realized experiments are worth sitting through to get to a straightforward number like the album-closing title cut, in which Zevon's protagonist ducks Western heroes, poets, and even Jesus Christ by insisting that he's got to go, because, well, "My ride's here." Wry and even somewhat profound, the song combines the mundane and the fantastic in a way that's quintessentially Zevon—funny, but not too funny.