Keep Me in Your Heart (2003) – Warren Zevon

I think Keep Me in Your Heart was the first Zevon song I came across and immediately took a liking. Later I would hear Mutineer, Lawyers, Guns and Money, & Werewolves of London. If you searched this song on a search engine you would hope to read information pertaining to the song. But alas no – what you get are search results filled with you tube songs / covers and lyrics.

Keep Me in Your Heart was released on The Wind his twelfth and final studio album by the American singer-songwriter.  Zevon began recording the album shortly after he was diagnosed with inoperable pleural mesothelioma (a cancer of the lining of the lung), and it was released just two weeks before his death on September 7, 2003.

Shadows are falling and I’m running out of breath
Keep me in your heart for a while
If I leave you, it doesn’t mean I love you any less:
Keep me in your heart for a while

When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun
Keep me in your heart for a while
There’s a train leaving nightly called “When All-is-Said-and-Done”
Keep me in your heart for a while

After about an hour of searching, I found this information about Keep Me in Your Heart in Songfacts:
This was the final song Zevon wrote and recorded before dying of mesothelioma (a form of lung cancer) in September of 2003. This was also the only song on Zevon’s final album The Wind that he wrote entirely after learning of his terminal illness. With the exception of the cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” all of the remaining songs on The Wind were songs Zevon had already at least started writing beforehand. Zevon also saved the recording of this song for last. His deteriorating health rendered him too weak to continue commuting to the studio where the other tracks had been recorded, so he had a makeshift studio set up at his home to record this song.

Warren Zevon never did it easy. He had many years of musical – critical negativity and alcohol and drug abuse. He had small successes but launched the aforementioned grand hits that would send him into rock heaven. Even Dylan covered him on many occasions such as the brilliant Mutineer.  Warren Zevon (1976) was his first album to chart in the United States, peaking at No. 189. The first edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide (published in 1979) called it “a masterpiece“. The guide’s latest edition (November 2004) calls it Zevon’s “most realized work“. 

Reference:
1. Songfacts – Keep Me in Your Heart

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand