About Me
Warren Zanes met me for coffee because I was hired to write his bio. He was wearing a very nice gray suit that his wife, the singer April March, purchased for him in France. His manners were, I have to admit, excellent, certainly not what I’d heard others describe. I don’t go in for hearsay, anyway.In the mid to late 1980s Zanes was a member of the critically lauded band The Del Fuegos. Since then he’s transformed into a college professor and is currently on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. While we were sitting there in the café, one of his students, an attractive young woman, came up to say hello to him. He stood up, shook her hand, introduced the two of us, and off she went. She was clearly fond of her professor. She was what my grandmother calls “fresh-faced†and my friends call “hot.†In that moment, I caught myself envying Warren Zanes and his world.I now realize that envy is the wrong response to Warren. His new recording, People That I’m Wrong For, is what convinced me of this. The CD knocked me out. It’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long time. Yes, I was hired to say just this (and generally do if the money is right), but this recording made my work easy. I didn’t hate myself for what I was about to do. In fact, the CD made me glad that we have a creature as odd—and by “odd†I mean difficult to categorize--as Warren Zanes. Rather than envy him his position in life, I now feel glad that he inhabits it with it a remarkable exactitude. He’s the right man for the job. Bottom line: I sense that he’s gotten very good at being Warren Zanes. Certainly better than most.A university professor, a writer whose work has appeared in everything from Rolling Stone to The Oxford American to The LA Times, a Vice President at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and a recording artist on the Dualtone label, Zanes clearly does not belong to any particular species. As is written on one of his elementary school report cards—his mother shared this with me when I called her to ask a few questions: “Warren is neither fish nor fowl.†If that report card was meaning to suggest that Warren should choose a species and get on with it, I would argue that his in-betweeness has become his chief asset. He’s a genuine modern man, shape-shifting his way through the wreckage of our world. His songs come from that experience, from what is, admittedly, our experience.Champions of Warren Zanes include musicians as diverse as Patty Griffin, Jakob Dylan and Joe Pernice, modern creatures themselves. In a recent book of interviews, none other than Tom Petty describes how Zanes’s book Dusty in Memphis inspired him to write one of the key tracks on his upcoming CD, Highway Companion. In Cleveland this past November, Zanes produced a tribute to Sam Cooke that included performances by Aretha Franklin, Solomon Burke, Elvis Costello, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Lou Rawls, the Dixie Hummingbirds, Gavin DeGraw, and several others. Simultaneous with that production, Zanes was a Visiting Scholar at Case Western’s prestigious Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities. Neither fish nor fowl, indeed.It is from amidst all these activities that People That I’m Wrong For emerges. But, to my ears, the CD is not separate from everything else Zanes does. More accurately, People That I’m Wrong For is perhaps the best expression of Warren’s relentless curiosity and investigative prowess. Recorded in Nashville, it is certainly a songwriter’s CD. But it also sounds like the band that played on it grew up in the same house and ate from the same pot. The CD was recorded in a week’s time, has the energy of the best live-in-the-studio recordings, but also has a precision about. Nothing seems random, and much of it sounds inevitable.What might be described as organic rock and roll, People That I’m Wrong For could only have been made by a fellow who knows his Slim Harpo and his Burt Bacharach and his Faces and doesn’t segregate influences. Produced by Daniel Tashian and engineered by Brad Jones, People That I’m Wrong For makes it as obvious as can be: Warren Zanes is among the best songwriters out there today. And his friends in the studio, Tashian, Jones, and their band of craftsmen, take very good care of him.People That I’m Wrong For made me think that we need music by people who live in the world, who go to the office, who lecture their students on occasion, who sometimes misbehave at social gatherings, who change diapers, who keep guitars under their desks. We need our artists to get a little dirty before they put pen to paper. I sense that Warren Zanes has done just this, and in doing so he’s given me something I need. I’m guessing you could use a little if it, too.Craig Underwood
