The 30 Best Warren Zevon Covers Ever

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Nov 072025
 

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

Warren Zevon Covers

This weekend, Warren Zevon gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after decades of eligibility. So, as the culmination of a week-long tribute to the 2025 Rock Hall class where we posted covers of every artist (catch up here), we are sharing a countdown of the 30 best Zevon covers ever.

Warren Zevon is one of those musicians that other musicians love, so he bats way above his commercial weight in cover songs. The most casual person probably only knows one Zevon song—and it’s appropriate this list is posting just after Halloween. Many music nerds, though, including many musicians, revere the full catalog. Artists way more famous than Zevon, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, have paid tribute, as have a host of younger acts that consider him a primary influence.

So whether you always hum along with the air conditioner in “Desperados Under the Eaves” or just like aah-ooo-ing to “Werewolves of London,” dive into the Zevon catalog via thirty amazing versions of his songs.

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Under The Radar: Delbert McClinton

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Feb 252025
 

Under the Radar shines a light on lesser-known cover artists. If you’re not listening to these folks, you should. Catch up on past installments here.

Delbert McClinton

Fear not, this is no obituary; Delbert McClinton is still around, a mere stripling of 84. Still, given that it’s been three years since his last album and more since he toured, I’d hate to have him slip away on me before I got the chance to celebrate him here.

Delbert who? That’s the response from most when I laud McClinton, his name having surprisingly little traction despite a career as long as my entire life. To answer the question, he’s a good ol’ boy from Lubbock, Texas, with a laissez-faire attitude to genre type-casting. Many of his records went top 20 positions in the US blues and country charts at the same time. We first heard of him playing his distinctive harmonica riffs on Bruce Channel’s “Hey, Baby.” In 1962! (That year he toured the UK with Channel; the Beatles were their opening act, and John Lennon famously got some playing tips from McClinton that he put to use on “Love Me Do.”)

That wasn’t even where McClinton began. He played Texas bar-bands from his teens, backing some of the blues legends then still on the road — Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins just to name a few. A hit with his own band, the Ron-Dels, “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go”, came in 1965, followed by a three-year partnership with Glen Clark, 1972-5, before striking out on his own. He was nominated for eight Grammy awards and won four — not too shabby. And let’s not forget his own songwriting, something he may even arguably be better known for. Emmylou Harris’s “Two More Bottles of Wine” was his, as well as many others that led to his 2011 indictment in the Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame.

But it is his gravelly, gritty renditions of the songs of others that we celebrate today, vocals that sound they have spent years in the saddle, ahead being trampled underfoot in a bar brawl, buried and then brined for posterity. Imagine a mix of Johns Fogerty and Hiatt, gargled with a sandpaper side, and you pretty much have it. A laryngologist’s nightmare, and perfect for his tramples over blues, country and rock and roll.
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