Q: Warren, you're going to be 53 in a couple of days. You've been making albums for almost 30 years. Your latest and ninth album, Life'll Kill Ya, is your first album in almost five years. At this stage of the game, I'm hoping that it's not you who was in the house when the house burned down.

A: Well, I was in the house, Jody. I didn't suffer third-degree burns, but I got singed. I think we all know we can take considerable portions of the song as -- yeah, first person, firsthand experience. Remember what we always said, in the songwriting field, there isn't a section for fiction and a section for nonfiction. It's all mixed together.

Q: Even though you've been making music for about 30 years, Warren Zevon is not a household name like Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan. What do you think the average music fan's perception is of you and your work?

A: I don't think about what other people's perception of me is. At least not any more than anybody in any field does. Than the cable guy or the guy who parks your car or your dentist thinks. Perhaps to a fault it doesn't enter into the artistic process. You know, it enters into the daily interactions of real life as much as it does for anybody.

Q: I read that you were born in Chicago and grew up in California and Arizona. Where do you live now?

A: Los Angeles.

Q: But this record, Life'll Kill Ya, does not sound like a quote, unquote "L.A. record".

A: Well, nothing ever sounded like an "L.A. record", really, to me.

Q: I think some of the early albums, when there was members of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles singing along and Jackson Browne was involved it had an L.A. vibe.

A: Well, Jackson Browne is from L.A., you know. And Glenn Frey was from Detroit and Henley was from Texas. Fleetwood Mac was English. I'm not trying to evade the label or anything, but it's the second biggest city in America and there's a lot of people there.

Q: You were a self-taught piano player, correct?

A: No, I took piano lessons. I was a self-taught guitarist, with shocking results.

Q: How old were you when you started playing music?

A: Like three.

Q: So would the term prodigy apply?

A: No, you have to be good, not just enthusiastic. I studied piano for a while. But I always wanted to play it and I started writing classical music and getting into some classical music young enough to be called a prodigy. If I'd been, you know, prodigiously talented or succeeded in any public way.

Q: Your relationship with Igor Stravinsky has been written about. Has it been overstated?

A: It's always exaggerated. But that's the nature of things. Sometimes you just stand back and smile and let it be exaggerated. It's flattering. But I knew him, which is unusual, I think. I don't think there are too many of us old rock musicians who knew Stravinsky. And I visited him. I visited his house. But I was kind of taken under the wing of his associate, a great conductor and great music writer and critic named Robert Craft.

Q: Did you ever write your own symphony?

A: Yeah. I play it for a couple of people that are familiar with that kind of stuff. I played them, you know -- as you can imagine, I played them like the synthesizer sampler rendition of it.

Q: What was the reaction?

A: They liked it. 20th Century classical music, real modern music. It's a funny thing. Looking back on it from a lifetime's fascination, interest, it's interesting. But I have to say, at the end of the day, if the average person hears a piece of music and are really put off by it, there's no criteria by which you can say they're wrong.

Q: Well, then, I want to make a left turn to some work you did earlier in your career -- in the early part of your career. You recorded a couple of singles as part of duo. You made jingles. The Turtles cut a couple of your songs. You did some session work. You also played piano with the Everly Brothers on the road. Did you always think that ultimately you were going to make your way as a singer/songwriter?

A: I never really had much choice and I always figured I'd survive one way or another as a musician. I was real lucky because I always had... some kind of ... work came along at the last minute, anyway. And I was always able to make some kind of living as a musician. And I also never really got rich. And that might have been lucky, too, you know.

Q: In what way?

A: Well, because the less time you spend with the issues of being rich, they are like the issues of being famous. They're not real issues, so they're not real life.

Q: And it leaves more time to be creative?

A: There's more of an exchange -- human exchange of ideas and feelings to be had on the bus stop than over the phone with your accountant. And if you're rich, you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant. It's necessary, I believe. Oh I know I'm happy and that means I must be lucky. That I know.

Q: There are Warren Zevon songs played on piano, Warren Zevon songs played on guitar. Is it intuitive how you decide which instrument you're going to play on each song?

A: I guess, because I played the piano when I was a kid and I played it seriously and I had to learn -- I played it technically correctly and stuff and then I got jobs playing it. I never had as much fun playing the piano, really, as the guitar. I hate to say that. There were other issues like the fact that I ran out of pianos and didn't really own an acoustic piano from, oh, about the time Mondale lost until today, say. And those determined what kind of songs I wrote, too, because you don't form a real bond with an electronic keyboard, no matter how swift it is.

Phil Everly made me the music director, like Paul Schaffer kind of, on a TV show he had in about 1970, I think. And it was a great show. I remember he had Kristofferson on. He had a lot of people on that respected him so much, you know, because of the Everly Brothers, that they were very comfortable with him, and he was a great talk show host. It was on late at night for a season. Strange to remember this. And I was the piano guy. And I remember the night this kid came in. And he was, you know, kind of dressed up like I was. He came in and sat down and started improvising on the piano. And it was Billy Joel. I've told Billy this story over the years. And he started playing the piano, kind of classical rock piano, which nobody played, I thought, but me, in my loftiest dreams. And as I told Billy, I stood behind him for five minutes and then I turned around and I walked across the set and out of the studio (laughs). And that's another, probably, one of the reasons why I didn't stay with the piano quite as much as I had.

Q: Warren, over the years, you've written more than your fair share of songs about guns and violence, plenty of songs about outlaws and espionage. Your one-time producer, Jackson Browne called your genre song noir. Is it a dark, fatalistic notion that life will kill you?

A: No, I don't think it's -- I mean, the fact that life will kill you is just that. It's a fact. I don't think this album is about aging issues. To me, it's not about aging, because I'm also lucky that I've had kids since I was a kid. So I've always been papa. In a way, I was old when I was 24, you know. So I don't think of myself in terms of, "oh, oh, I turned the corner, now I'm old." As Michael Caine said the other day, "I don't think I'm middle-aged. I don't know anybody 106" (laughs). So I don't think that's the issue.

To me, the song is more about being dead. I think you have to spend a fair amount of time realizing that you will be, so that you'll remember to enjoy everything you possibly can every minute you're not. You always want to try and tell younger people that, which is very difficult, because they don't really hear it because they feel a life has been imposed on them. And of course, they're absolutely correct. But still, you want to tell them, hey, you know, there's a lot -- you can be having a lot of fun. It's all good. As Snoop Doggy-Dog and my father used to say, "It's all good."

Q: I'm surprised you say this isn't an album about aging. It seems to me that the thoughts of your own mortality bother you more now than when you sang I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.

A: No, they didn't bother me then and they don't bother me now (laughs). It's just as true now. It's not too... is it truer? I guess it's truer. You know, when Jackson said that about song noir, I know he means it as a compliment and he means it in a style of -- in the sense of those ‘40s Los Angeles kind of tough-guy detective story writers that I had never read until I was compared to. But I don't really think of my songs as particularly violent. I guess my favorite author really of all was Escalus. And he was more violent, 2500 years ago, than anything on cable TV now. So was Shakespeare. All the time. Real violent. I mean, really, really violent. In every sense. I just think that popular music, as we understood it for a long time, was limited to a kind of -- not limited in any way, but you know, songs about a certain thing. Love songs, for the most part. And Rogers and Hart wrote great love songs. And J.D. Souther wrote -- writes great love songs. And it wasn't exactly what I was doing, that was all.

Q: Life'll Kill Ya isn't the first time you've sung about karma and reincarnation. Your songs have always had religious allusions from Mohammed's Radio to the new song, Ourselves to Know. Were you brought up with certain religious beliefs that creep into your lyrics?

A: Yeah, I was, uh, I was brought up with religious beliefs. Christian religious beliefs. But you know, it's one of life's great searches and I don't like talking about it. And I don't like talking about it more than I do in my songs in public.

Q: Well, I'll take another tact, then. Because, perhaps, the ultimate Christ-like metaphor and cautionary tale for those who've had fame and fortune is the life of Elvis Presley. You wrote about Elvis before in Jesus Mentioned. And I'm thinking he's the inspiration for Porcelain Monkey.

A: Yeah, Porcelain Monkey, it's hard to deny. I was writing a song with one of my oldest and best friends and most frequent collaborators Jorge Calderon. And we were working on a different song. Actually, a kind of violent and terrible song. Too terrible to talk about now. And I noticed on his songwriting notebook as we sat on the sofa suffering in my apartment, working, he had a postcard that turned out to be from Graceland - of the TV room, with the porcelain monkey sitting on the coffee table with the, you know, the onyx eyes. And that inspired us. I said, "What's that?" And he said, "That's Elvis' porcelain monkey." And then we had to spend the next week or two writing the song. Jorge and I talk all the time. You know, almost every day. And I called Jorge last night and his daughter -- his grown daughter was there, he wasn't. And she said, "You know, a friend of mine just came from a trip to Memphis and she said to me, "You know, I went to Graceland?" "Yeah." "And the most striking thing I saw in the whole place was this porcelain monkey of Elvis'."

Q: To produce Life'll Kill Ya, you chose two guys, Paul Q. Colderie and Sean Slade. Their best-known production credits are with groups like Radiohead, Hole, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, not people who you'd think would be your first choice to produce your new record.

A: They were, though, when I found out they produced Radiohead. That was all the recommendation I needed. Radiohead is one of my favorite groups, which means out of two or three of all time.