#Hasten down the wind. plus#
#Hasten down the wind. free#

In short, we sometimes have to lose things to reveal who we really are. She tells him she thinks she needs to be free He tells her he doesn't understand She takes his hand She tells him nothing's working out the way they planned She's so many women He can't find the one who was his friend So he's hanging on to half her heart He can't have the restless part So he tells her to hasten down the wind Then he agrees he thinks she needs to be free Then she says she'd. But recognizing that this is not meant to be and letting these things go allows us to perhaps find our truer selves.

We often hold onto things–people, ideas and hopes and dreams– that don’t truly fit with who we are with the thin hope that things will somehow change to match our perceptions. There is something bittersweet yet liberating in this idea that sometimes things are just not meant to be. I see this in this painting with the Red Tree reluctantly holding onto those leaves as they struggle to depart on the wind even though it knows that it has to be this way, that they must leave. The song is about the end of a relationship, where the girl recognizes that nothing is working for them any more and the guy finally grudgingly admits it as well, telling her to leave, to go hasten down the wind. I just always loved the imagery in that phrase– hasten down the wind– and thought it fit well with this piece. If that sounds familiar you probably remember the old Warren Zevon song from the the 70’s most famously covered by Linda Ronstadt on her album with the same title. It’s 10″ by 30″ on canvas and is titled Hasten Down the Wind. And in the spare, heartbreaking ” El Amor de mi Vida,” Zevon leaves the listener with an unforgettable image: a man looking out at a world that, somewhere, holds the woman who used to love him: “I look outside, I know you’re there/ And you’ve found a brand new life somewhere/ I only wish it had been us/ But I’m happy for your happiness.” It’s a lovely sending-off, with forgiveness and an open heart-the way we’d all want to be sent off, to a new lover, a new place, or whatever fresh mysteries lie beyond the life we know.This is a painting that I finished over the weekend. ” Keep Me in Your Heart,” finished at his home studio in April after he was no longer able to travel, bids a cleareyed goodbye to an old love, and the language couldn’t be much homelier: “Sometimes when you’re doing simple things around the house/ Maybe you’ll think of me and smile/ You know I’m tied to you like the buttons on your blouse/ Keep me in your heart for awhile.” It’s the modesty of that qualifying “maybe,” and the shrugging “for awhile,” that make the sentiment hard to shake off. In two ballads co-written with Jorge Calderón, though, he found the voice for a songwriter’s farewell. Unfortunately, his prognosis is the same.” It doesn’t seem likely that Zevon will be appearing in public again. A PR person for Artemis says, “Some days are better than others for him. He lived to finish the record and to see his grandchildren born. “July 2003: Warren is still alive,” the official bio says, and that’s that. It’d feel like a gimmick if the guest stars weren’t so well-used-Cooder’s plangent guitar on “Dirty Life & Times,” Henley and Schmit’s sympathetic vocal backing on “She’s Too Good for Me,” Walsh reprising the gutbucket pleasures of “Rocky Mountain Way” in “Rub Me Raw.”Įven Zevon’s record label seems to grasp that this is a moment to keep it simple. Schmit, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Emmylou Harris-a Murderer’s Row of singer-songwriter talent.

#Hasten down the wind. plus#

Other old friends and co-conspirators are in the mix: longtime collaborator Jorge Calderón, plus Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Timothy B. Even funny and very Zevonesque tropes like “I’m sprawled across the davenport of despair” are mounted in a setting of creeping decay (” Disorder in the House,” with a raging guitar lead by Bruce Springsteen). It’s a mantle the record wears gracefully, though, in ways both small (the keening crunch of David Lindley’s lap steel guitar, a sound so recognizable to anyone who was there in the ‘70s that it’s sure to induce a small shock of sense memory) and big: The familiar outlaw-on-the-run motif of ” Dirty Life & Times“ holds an unmistakable sense of the clock running down. It’s not surprising that this part of Zevon’s sensibility is front and center on The Wind (Artemis Records), or that the project carries with it a valedictory air.