warren zevon roland the headless thompson gunner lyrics

Go to and on this post you can see/hear each of the songs mentioned in this column. You can’t click on a link in the paper, but you can on my Facebook page. She has inspired a whole new generation of writers and upcoming artists and deserves respect for all the incredibly hard work she has put down throughout the years.This is my first interactive column. The reason I bother to write all this, is because I feel it is time to leave her alone. There was a nice and long Q&A at the Tribeca film festival where she sat down with director Mike Mills and all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere she starts to chat about analog film stock, so you’ll get the picture. And she is an A-student in anything she does, the one you want in class. Because instead of hiring someone and letting them do their work and taking credit for it she basically went into (unofficial) film school., getting mentors and professionals to teach her. It’s a well known fact that she has written the treaties for many of her videos for quite some time but hasn’t directed any of them until recently.

She loves to collaborate with people she respects and can learn from. You can actually sense, I did at least, the anger of disbelief in their eyes in the Long Pond Session when she talks about William Bovery/Awlyn, but who knows) And don’t think Dessner and Antonoff did either.

So even when they don’t realise it, she always gets exactly the instrumental she wants (there are only two producers,Dessner and Antonoff, on Folklore, but sounds like one - Awlyn didn’t produce **** and was added after the Grammy nomination on enough songs to make him eligible. But more times is just them helping her with the production, fleshing out her demos and ideas (At the other end of the spectrum, people have actually accused her of being way too generous with giving away credits, but that is how she rolls and that’s another story). she will simply write a song and then they will continue from there and she is incredibly quick. So if he or Antonoff play her a musical idea/sketch, i.e a sketch to an instrumental that gets her creativity going she is not going to turn them down. She always was a fan of the National, hence she brought in Dessner for her last two projects and they seem to have clicked immediately on a musical level. And they are always extremely talented in their own right. The producers she works with (she only works with very few select ones, so you never see those endless lists of producers and writers that you see on many modern recordings), are all multi instrumentalist and in many ways equivalent to a band. And I can assure you that it is not because of her vocal skills (I always loved her voice and vocal style, but technically she hasn’t been there, until relatively recently ), nor her skills as guitar, banjo or piano player. So, with that, I invite you to prove me wrong by clueing me in to some current artists who get outside their own troubled brains to explore the universe and introduce listeners to colorfuls casts of characters and unforgettable adventures.Īnd if they can write a hook and aren't permanently depressed, that would be a bonus, too.Īnyway, you are talking about an artist who has been a star far 16 years now while most of her contemporaries has fallen into obscurity and musical irrelevance, one by one. Let's face it - few of us are that interesting that we could write an album's worth of songs about ourselves, let alone make a career of it. Welp, unless you've got a ton of cool experiences to confess, that gets old real quick. The buzzword I hear used to describe it is 'confessional'. It seems that most new music I hear is written in first person and attempts to share something of the writer's current mood. Ray Davies regaling me with stories of his Queen Victoria. Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia putting me inside a frigid Northwood cabin with a Dire Wolf prowling outside.

The Beatles introducing me to a Paperback Writer. Warren Zevon singing about Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. I love a writer who can step out of his or her brain and tell me a wild story about other people, places and times. One of my beefs with many current artists ( somewhere after 'there are no hooks' and 'must you be so sad and wistful *all* the time?') is the self-centeredness of their songwriting.

Warren zevon roland the headless thompson gunner lyrics