This from RollingStone:
VH1 is filming Warren Zevon's recording sessions for his final album for a one-hour documentary. Zevon was diagnosed late this summer with inoperable cancer in both lungs, and his doctors give him only weeks to live.
Guests on the album include Don Henley and Bob Dylan, who has been playing Zevon songs on his current tour. Despite this being Zevon's final album, his goal remains the same: "Make people look," Zevon told Rolling Stone, quoting one of his favorite novelists Joseph Conrad. "There might be a song or two on the more sensitive side, and there might be a long lost love song, but there's also some raucous, some mischievous and a few tasteless ideas. Sometimes it seems to come along by great leaps, and then it slows down like they always do."
After receiving his prognosis, Zevon joked about looking forward to being a self-pitying, bedridden invalid, but in recent weeks he's kept busy, catching Dylan's show in Los Angeles and planning an October 30th appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in New York. The entire show will be dedicated to Zevon, and he will play live, a performance including "Genius," the title track from the recently released greatest hits collection. Zevon's been a frequent guest on Letterman's show over the years, and once led the band when Paul Shaffer was on vacation. Letterman also appeared on Zevon's 2002 album, My Ride's Here, shouting the phrase "hit somebody" during the chorus of "The Hockey Song."
With his last two albums, My Ride's Here and 2000's Life'll Kill Ya," Zevon explored sickness and death in his usual wry fashion, an attitude he's maintained even as his ideas about death have been jolted out of the abstract.
"The reason I put the skull with my glasses on every album is because it reminds me not to take myself seriously," Zevon said. "Most people do take themselves seriously in this job, but so as long as I have that skull wearing my glasses beaming back at me from my luggage tags and ****, it tends to remind me before it's too late, that I better lighten up a little bit."
Mark