“Splendid Isolation,” Wheeler Opera House, Aspen, CO, 12 January 1996

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Zevon began the vast majority of his solo performances with “Splendid Isolation” and one listen to this version should satisfy you as to why. The rocking, electric arrangement of the Transverse City (Virgin, 1989) version of the song is beautifully ironic but here, strummed through the 12-string and accompanied by Duncan Dr. Babyhead Aldrich’s wistful electric solo, “Splendid Isolation” retains its beauty by matching the mood evoked by its lyrics:

I want to live all alone in the desert.
I want to be like Georgia O’Keefe.
I want to live on the Upper East Side
And never go down in the street.

Splendid isolation,
I don’t need no one.
Splendid isolation. …

Don’t want to wake up with no one beside me;
Don’t want to take up with nobody new;
Don’t want nobody coming by without calling first;
Don’t want nothing to do with you.

I’m putting tinfoil up on the windows,
Lying down in the dark to dream.
I don’t want to see their faces,
I don’t want to hear them scream.

As far as Zevon goes, that first verse has it all. It’s solipsistic. It’s pretentious. It conveys in concrete terms the inextricability of emotion and place. And it ironizes its speaker. To me, the most wonderful thing about “Splendid Isolation,” lyrically, is that Zevon’s protagonist, for all his talk about wanting to be quarantined from society (“them” of the last verse), is sitting in his room imagining himself singing to a woman — “Don’t want nothing to do with you.” Zevon dramatizes this situational irony through his vocal effect on the last word of the middle eight. The speaker yearn for solitude that will never suffice; it’s the consolation of bitterness that supplies his selfhood. His muse.  This is the critical self-awareness that elevates Zevon’s lyrics, in general, from obnoxious whinings to insightful art. Continue reading →