On April 12, 2003, Warren Zevon did not go to the studio. He could not anymore. So his longtime friend and co-writer Jorge Calderón and engineer Noah Scot Snyder came to his home in Los Angeles, set up to record, and Zevon sat down on his couch and sang “Keep Me in Your Heart.” It would close his final album, The Wind, and it was the last song he recorded.
His daughter Ariel was there for the vocal. She was pregnant with twins at the time. Years later, she told MOJO that one picture from that session stayed with her.
“The image of him touching my stomach was on the same day.”
— Ariel Zevon
The First Song After the News
The song started eight months earlier. In August 2002, after bouts of dizziness and shortness of breath, Warren Zevon finally saw a doctor. The diagnosis was mesothelioma, inoperable. He was given about three months.
Zevon passed on treatment and went back to work on the album he and Calderón had already been planning. CBS News described “Keep Me in Your Heart” as the first song he wrote after the diagnosis, and the one on the album most directly about his condition. Its first line is about shadows falling and running out of breath. The song is credited to Warren Zevon and Jorge Calderón.
The Song He Offered to His Friend
As the months went on and the cancer gained ground, the other songs on The Wind got finished, many of them with famous friends dropping by: Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Dwight Yoakam and more. “Keep Me in Your Heart” was still waiting.
At one point, Zevon suggested that Calderón sing it himself. Calderón told MOJO he answered with a blunt, profane refusal. In biographer James Campion’s account of the sessions, Calderón kept nudging Zevon to get the song on tape himself.
Recorded on the Couch
By spring, the drive to the studio was too much for Warren Zevon. So the session came to him. Calderón played acoustic guitar, bass and tres on the track, and longtime session drummer Jim Keltner played drums. Zevon’s part was the vocal, sung sitting down.
Calderón summed up that day in a 2003 interview with Rolling Stone. Zevon was weak, he said,
“But he sat on the couch and sang, and it was great.”
— Jorge Calderón
Once the album was done, Ariel has said, her father went downhill quickly.
Twelve Days
He held on through the summer. On June 11, 2003, Ariel gave birth to his first grandchildren, twin boys named Maximus Patrick and Augustus Warren. In August, VH1 premiered a documentary about the making of the album. It carried the song’s name, Keep Me in Your Heart, and Zevon lived to see it air.
The Wind was released on August 26, 2003. Warren Zevon died at home 12 days later, on September 7. He was 56. The doctors’ three months had stretched to more than a year.
The album climbed to No. 12, his best showing since Excitable Boy in 1978, and went on to win two Grammys. “Keep Me in Your Heart” was nominated for Song of the Year. In 2024, Willie Nelson recorded it for his album Last Leaf on the Tree.
Ariel kept the song close in a simpler way. Talking to the Forward about the twins, she said:
“I played that song to my boys when they were little to go to sleep.”
— Ariel Zevon