Jail/Prison Top Ten: Prison Grove (#9)

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Here’s the way this scenario plays out: John gives me a topic that he’s sure I can never work a favorite artist into....and I take the topic and see how many favorites I can work into it. No, not really. John was kind enough to throw me a softball subject — jail/prison songs — and this guy just happened to show up. Here’s today’s incarcerated tune. #9: Prison Grove - Warren Zevon Warren Zevon, you may be surprised to learn, had three gold albums in his life: this one (which reached gold status in the ten days between its release and his death), 1978’s Excitable Boy...and the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy. He wrote the song “She Quit Me,” which was used in the film as “He Quit Me.” Now that you have your dose of trivia for the day, let’s talk about this song. This is a painful album to listen to. Honestly, it’s my least-played Zevon album. As you listen to Zevon struggle to sing this song about dying as a means of being liberated from a cancer-riddled body you can feel the anguish. It’s a hard song to listen to (and a hard album to listen to), but Zevon accepted his fate and turned out a great farewell album, complete with all the emotions you’d expect from someone who’d been told they were going to die. Prison Grove Written by Jorge Calderón and Warren Zevon Recorded by Warren Zevon From The Wind, 2003 All these broken lives: