No. 013 - Warren Zevon's "Keep Me In Your Heart" changed my life
Writer David Gianadda's ethereal connection to this song goes beyond the limitations of time and space
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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.
• 6 min read •
In old age we tend to look back on moments as pivotal to our being. Moments, both good and bad, as definitions of who we are, or were, or are to become.
I have many such moments now as I approach old age. If I live to one hundred, I could mark each moment with a song as the soundtrack to that particular place of that former me, current me, or of the becoming me.
At twelve, it was my brother’s Neil Young record. Slipping it out of the cover and putting the needle to the vinyl. The ringing guitar of “Don’t Be Denied.” Even the cover itself, somehow an insight into my leather jacketed brother.
But this story is about something that came later, after I had seen hundreds of concerts and listened to thousands of songs on vinyl and cassette and compact disc (and each of those songs are a story about me too).
In the early 2000s everything I had built had been swept out from under me. “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette. It was as though a once in a lifetime storm had swept through and destroyed everything I had become.
I was left adrift in a cruel Texas, a thousand miles away from everything and everyone who loved me in New York. That’s a song too. “Dallas” by Jimmie Dale Gilmore.
I won’t bore you with all of the details. It’s a story we all live. Love lost or more accurately a love that was deceit. Bills. Scratch paper figuring, adding up to nothing, and deducting. Deducting. Deducting. Emptiness. Loss.
My mother, a thousand miles away, with a port in her chest. We all know this story too, or know someone with this story. Stage IV.
In the midst of my blackness when everything went wrong, my kind mother was losing her light. Withering. Towards the end, when the cancer had metastasized to her brain she too was scribbling figures on scratch paper. Grocery lists, hospital bills and what is left after. Deducting. Deducting.
I’d call and in her thin voice she’d ask how I was. She wanted me to know I was okay even when I couldn’t feel that. My brothers and sister flew me out while she was still having her good days. We went to Niagara Falls and stood in the spray.
We looked at old photographs of her, of the her before me. The her that none of us knew. The sunlight captured in her eyes by my father with a cheap camera that produced a priceless portrait. I took all of the photographs of the her that was before me or my brothers and sister. My teen mother on a blanket with a radio. What song was playing?
My mother before she was a mother, a girl in a swim cap. I looked for clues beyond the frame and saw my father capturing her in Lake Erie. There she was staring into the lens, smiling and vibrant again. We buried her on Halloween and that night watched the ghosts run across the lawns.
Then I was back to empty rooms in Texas. I listened to a lot of sad songs. Richard Shindell’s “Are You Happy Now” with its Halloween lyric was my life.
I listened to it echo over the bare floor until I was out of beer. I leafed through old photos and wanted the telephone to ring. To hear my mother ask me how I was again. It stood silent. In the silence, I listened to Sinead sing “Last Day of our Acquaintance.”
Then the winter rains came and it rained relentlessly in Texas. In that rain, Warren Zevon’s song “Keep Me In Your Heart” came to me. I’m not even sure how.
I knew his song “Werewolves of London.” I vaguely remembered his last appearance on David Letterman where he talked about his terminal cancer. His famous parting words to “enjoy every sandwich.” I looked it up on YouTube. Then I listened to the song again and my eyes welled up. I listened to it again.
It was like my mother was reaching out to me through his words. “When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun, keep me in your heart for a while.” Then I listened to it again.
In that relentless rain, in those bare rooms, I stretched out backwards in time and then forward, to Lake Erie, and my mother on the beach calling me in. To the grace of her hand holding a nectarine of sunlight. The juice slipping over my chin. She was a simmering ragu in winter and she was knotting a knitted scarf around my neck as a child again.
I listened again. The photographs of my mother spread out now. The lyrics “if I leave you it doesn’t mean I love you any less, keep me in your heart for a while” a simple truth.
I listened to that song for months, many months. I leaned into the buffeting rain and wind. I came back to myself. I let the people I cared about know how much I loved them. I saw myself as I was, cared for and loved and lucky, and I saw myself expand into the future.
I painted bad watercolors and hung them on the bare walls. I made my mom’s sauce with the lyrics “sometimes when you’re doing simple things around the house, maybe you’ll think of me and smile” blaring from cheap thrifted speakers. Then I did smile.
In my grief I was buoyed by his song. I saw myself again as my mother saw me, full of hope and kindness and goodness.
It’s astounding to me to think how his song carried me through my grief in such a beautiful way. How it brought my mother back to me, but also how it reminded me of the thing I thought I had forgotten. How the ordinary is extraordinary. Buttons on a blouse and sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, love. ◆
About David
David Gianadda is originally from Buffalo, New York. He is the author of the novel, Everything You Say is Goodbye. His short stories and poems have been published in The Midwest Quarterly, ArtVoice, New World Writing, Eyeshot, Opium Magazine, The Red River Review, and the once glorious Surgery of Modern Warfare. He lives with his wife, the photographer, Emily Stoker and their dog, Birdie, in Fort Worth, Texas.
Instagram @davidgianadda
Website davidgianadda.com
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I truly love this song. And thanks for these beautifully written memories.
The song, to me, is more powerful because Warren Zevon was a songwriter utterly allergic to sentiment and false emotion. If anything, he was a complete cynic. But hearing him have moments of genuine emotion on this song is almost overwhelming. I've loved this song forever.
thanks for writing