The 30 Best Warren Zevon Covers Ever

Head back to the beginning.

10. Drive-By Truckers — Play It All Night Long

You could argue that there is no band better suited to cover Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long” than the Drive-By Truckers. The original, from 1980’s Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, is musically pretty laid back, but with harsh, satirical lyrics lampooning Southern stereotypes, and maybe also classic rock radio. But it centers on references to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” two songs behind the so-called feud that has led to the spilling of much actual and virtual ink. The album that catapulted the Truckers from a regional bar band to national and international acclaim, 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, is heavily influenced (musically and thematically) by Skynyrd, and includes “Ronnie and Neil,” their take on the “feud.”

At least as early as 2002, they were covering “Play It All Night Long” at live shows, and in 2004, they recorded a studio version that finally was released in 2009 on The Fine Print (A Collection of Oddities And Rarities). And with its rocking, crunching three-guitar attack (including Jason Isbell, who was still in the band), it would have fit right in on SRO. Which, in my book, is a serious compliment. — Jordan Becker

9. Shawn Colvin — Tenderness on the Block

Shawn Colvin was thirty-six years old when she released Fat City, her second album. One can imagine that she related to the woman in Zevon’s “Tenderness on the Block” going from wide-eyed to streetwise. Indeed, Colvin very gently takes the song from the parents watching their little girl grow up too fast, and she gives ownership to that girl. She even finds a hook in the song that Zevon didn’t, and her repetition of “she’s gonna find true love” seals “Tenderness” as a song about hellos and not goodbyes. — Patrick Robbins

8. The Wailin’ Jennys — Keep Me in Your Heart

Zevon composed surely his most poignant lyrics for the final song on his final album, “Keep Me In Your Heart”: “The shadows are falling and I’m running out of breath / Keep me in your heart for a while / If I leave you, it doesn’t mean I love you any less / Keep me in your heart for a while.” He was dying when he wrote them and feeling daily the symptoms of terminal lung cancer — caused by a lifetime of smoking — that he knew were soon to take him away from the family he doted on.

Anyone who subsequently covered the song would therefore have to treat those lyrics with the utmost tenderness. That’s what his songwriting partner, Jorge Calderón, did with Jennifer Warnes in 2004. That’s what Madeleine Peyroux did in 2014. And that’s what Canadian/American female folk trio The Wailin’ Jennys did in 2017. The modern-day bluegrass trinity of Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch couldn’t have brought more delicate and affecting harmonies to those heartfelt words, as much about wanting to be remembered by loved ones after death as to remain a comfort to them in their everyday thoughts. — Adam Mason

7. Linda Ronstadt — Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Zevon’s songs are smart, literary, and musically sophisticated. Zevon delivers them himself in a particular way, which you can grow to love. There is beauty in that, of course. But, beautiful in a broader sense? For that you need to go to Linda Ronstadt. The message is the same, and can still hit hard, but the harmonies and musicality are the supple velvet glove over the rough, rusty iron fist. — Mike Tobyn

6. Luke Elliot — Boom Boom Mancini

On November 13, 1982, I turned on CBS Sports Saturday just in time for the 14th round of the boxing match between Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Duk Koo Kim. As the camera zoomed in on Kim in his corner, the announcer said, “You may not have heard of him before. You will remember him today.” Fifteen seconds later, he was flat on his back, laid low by a Mancini right hand. Five days later he was dead. Mancini was devastated; many say he was never the same person after that, let alone the same boxer. But he had more than his share of defenders, and Warren Zevon was among them; his song “Boom Boom Mancini” included the couplet “They made hypocrite judgements after the fact / But the name of the game is be hit and hit back.”

“When I was living in New Haven, Connecticut,” said singer-songwriter Luke Elliot, “I would listen to the album Sentimental Hygiene on repeat in my car, and I always played `Boom Boom Mancini’ twice. There’s a violence to it that made me curious, a ferocity in Warren’s voice that made me want to find out more about the story, more about the people involved.” His cover sees that curiosity bearing fruit of light and dark hues, paying well-earned respect to Zevon and Mancini both. It won’t erase my memory of that fight, but it will give a lot of additional perspective. — Patrick Robbins

5. Naomi Bedford — Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner

It is rare for songs as idiosyncratic as this to ever succeed in coverland, not least as it is so damn odd. In most hands it would become parody, a novelty song for singing comedians. Yet Roland, in Zevon’s hands, was neither novelty nor comedic, being merely the off-kilter way his mind took on the, in part, true tale, read about by chance. And, by his standards, not even that different a choice for inspiration, given his other works.

Naomi Bedford is a country/folk singer from England, who works frequently alongside Paul Simmonds of folk-punk band The Men They Couldn’t Hang. Her very Dolly Parton-esque warble imparts a bizarre delicacy to the song, the arrangement transported to Appalachia, making the narrative even weirder. It has a grotesque charm that the author would likely fully appreciate. — Seuras Og

4. Pixies — Ain’t That Pretty At All

The knockout celebration of being let down/shouty anthem of disappointment, “Ain’t That Pretty at All” sounds like the agitated, cynical older brother of Don Henley’s “All She Wants to Do is Dance” (but like, way better). The Pixies twist it into a duet that is nasty, hilarious and totally “whatever.” Frank Black is perfectly crazed. The coolest person on earth, Kim Deal, vocally blows smoke out her nostrils and audibly laughs when Frank goes over the top with his trademark scream-sing. It’s a riot. — Hope Silverman

3. Bob Dylan — Accidentally Like a Martyr

Fans attending the opening night of Bob Dylan’s 2002 Fall Tour in Seattle were greeted by several surprises. The first was the sight of Dylan, for so long synonymous with the guitar, opening the concert playing a keyboard. The second arrived four songs into the set when Bob and co. launched into a spirited cover of the now-exiled “Brown Sugar.” The third came one song later, when Dylan unveiled yet another cover: Warren Zevon’s “Accidentally Like A Martyr.”

This was an especially poignant inclusion. Just weeks earlier, Zevon had announced that he had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and Dylan delivers the song with all the sensitivity that such an occasion required; just listen to the perfectly-weighted pause between “never thought I would be so lonely” and “for such a long long time,” followed by Dylan singing the title of one of his own albums, “time out of mind.”

And that wasn’t all. Bob performed two more Zevon covers that night (“Mutineer” and “Boom Boom Mancini”) and a few shows later added “Lawyers, Guns and Money” too The two rockers were temporary additions to the set, but “Accidentally” and “Mutineer” stuck around for the whole tour, long enough for the ailing Zevon to see them performed in person at a concert in Los Angeles.

Fun Fact: Bob and Warren separately sang “Accidentally Like a Martyr” on the same night, October 30 2002, at roughly the same time: Bob at a concert in St Paul, Minnesota, and Zevon at the taping for his final appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. — Tim Edgeworth

2. Jill Sobule — Don’t Let Us Get Sick

One of Zevon’s later songs, from 2000’s Life’ll Kill Ya, it reaches deep into Zevon’s preoccupation with illness and, ultimately, death; no small irony, given the singer was notoriously shy of doctors. Hindsight suggests he may already been ill, from the mesothelioma, which, 3 years later, would kill him. However, it seems likely coincidence, given the speed mesothelioma generally runs. Nonetheless, it was the perfect song with which the dying singer chose to sing, at his final TV appearance, on the Letterman show.

Sobule actually does very little to the song, bar gifting her frail and innocent tones to the acerbic lyric, sticking with the acoustic arrangement. Zevon’s version has amongst his own best vocal, a cracked pitcher, offering his homespun wisdom, in a song that could pass as a prayer. One of the highpoints of the 2004 Zevon tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich, it would be fabulous to hear this sung as a duet, between them. And, who knows, after Sobule’s untimely death, earlier this year, maybe the two of them have now had a crack at just that. — Seuras Og

1. Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires — Mutineer

“Mutineer” comes in hot with a buccaneer’s swagger, but becomes a tender ode to companionship within a few short lines. Few can deliver this song better than Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires, who sing every syllable in flawless harmony—they express that theme of partnership from the “Yo ho ho” get-go.

The song seems to spring from a life deeply and perhaps recklessly lived; that was Warren Zevon through and through, the Excitable Boy, always wholeheartedly all-in, from one zany project to another. Isbell is cut from the same cloth—it’s in the testimony of his own songs. “Danko/Manuel” (written during Isbell’s stint in the Drive-By Truckers) reveals his uneasy kinship with high-flying rogues and road warriors, and shows how he sees himself in these romantic and tragic figures. My guess is that Jason Isbell comes at this song from deep inside, as if he’d written it himself. (Or not: today I learned it wasn’t his idea to cover “Mutineer,” it was then-wife Amanda Shires who brought it forward. Thank goodness she did.)

This live version features Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and one of Warren Zevon’s best advocates, David Letterman, almost overcome with gratitude at the end. — Tom McDonald

Check out more installments in our monthly “Best Covers Ever” series, including Metallica, The Rolling Stones, Kate Bush, Pixies, and more.

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