Various artists Keep Me in Your Heart: the Songs of Warren Zevon
There’s a profound irony in Warren Zevon’s work: a songwriter fixated on mortality who left behind songs that continue to outlive him. More than twenty years after his death, Keep Me in Your Heart, a new multi-artist tribute album, suggests why that may be.
For an artist who never had much commercial success, Zevon is having a moment. Over the past year, he has been welcomed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, celebrated at a high-profile tribute concert in Los Angeles, and now honored on Keep Me in Your Heart, a new multi-artist tribute album drawing from across his catalog. The attention—especially his recognition by the Hall—feels overdue, a reminder that Zevon’s reputation has always rested less on sales or radio play than on the durability of the songs themselves.
Tribute albums are, by definition, a mixed bag. They invite comparison with definitive originals and often struggle to justify their own existence. Zevon’s songs, in particular, resist reinvention; their bite, humor, and emotional precision can make lesser versions feel unnecessary. He could sketch a whole moral universe in a single couplet or deploy gallows humor with a shrug, reducing catastrophe to logistics. Keep Me in Your Heart is no exception: some performances land as respectful but redundant, offering little that Zevon himself didn’t already say better. But two things ultimately distinguish this collection from the usual tribute-album clutter.
First, the songs themselves. Zevon’s catalog proves remarkably resilient under scrutiny. The album balances familiar touchstones—“Excitable Boy,” “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me”—with deeper cuts and late-period material, including songs later gathered on posthumous releases like Preludes and Reconsider Me: The Love Songs. Even when an interpretation falters, the writing remains unmistakable: concise, unsentimental, and alert to human weakness without pretending to rise above it.
Second, when the album works, it works exceptionally well. Veteran New York rocker and songwriter Willie Nile’s take on “Mutineer” is among the record’s clear highlights, delivering the song with grit and conviction rather than reverence. Jimmy Webb’s reading of “Desperados Under the Eaves” offers a different kind of authority. One of the great American songwriters, Webb approaches the song with restraint and clarity, trusting its architecture rather than trying to embellish it. He doesn’t modernize or dramatize; he lets the song reveal itself.
Keep Me in Your Heart also benefits from a strong sense of place. Released by Long Island–based Paradiddle Records, the album draws heavily from that region’s music community. Many of the contributors are working musicians rather than marquee names, and that proves to be a strength. These performances often feel less like formal tributes than like songs passed along—learned in clubs, reimagined on small stages, and carried forward because they speak to something essential.
That spirit animates much of the record. Pete Mancini & the Hillside Airmen find the quiet ache at the center of “Accidentally Like a Martyr.” Jack Licitra brings piano-led tenderness to “Tenderness on the Block.” Claudia Jacobs gives “Empty-Hearted Town” room to breathe, letting its loneliness linger rather than resolve. Elsewhere, artists dig into Zevon’s lesser-known songs, drawing attention to material that rewards curiosity rather than comfort.
Warren Zevon fits more comfortably in the Americana lineage than in the Laurel Canyon scene he’s often associated with. He drew on the plainspoken storytelling and moral ambiguity of writers like John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, and Guy Clark, favoring songs built around flawed characters, bad decisions, and hard-earned clarity rather than confession or uplift. Where Prine often softened his observations with warmth and humor, Zevon sharpened his, leaning into gallows wit and emotional abrasion. That kinship mattered: his work became a benchmark for later writers like Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, and even Bob Dylan, who cited Zevon by name and carried his songs onto the stage. His legacy isn’t a sound so much as a stance: trust the song, respect the listener, and don’t flinch.
Keep Me in Your Heart doesn’t pretend to be definitive, and it doesn’t need to be. What it offers instead is something more convincing: evidence that Warren Zevon’s songs—by turns funny, bitter, tender, and unsparing—are still being sung, still being tested, and still proving that they have a life of their own.
You can find the music here: https://paradiddlerecords.com/keep-me-in-your-heart-the-songs-of-warren-zevon