"Excitable Boy" by Warren Zevon (1978)
Dad's Song of the Day #63, Oct. 31, 2025
Wait a sec…Did he just say “built a cage of her bones?”
I’ve got a creepy little horror story for Hallowe’en today, brought to you by Warren Zevon’s stupendous “Excitable Boy” album. I mean, seriously, this is one of those records that, for me, has zero skip-able songs.
The title track, “Excitable Boy,” is a jaunty little barrel-house piano number, with a memorable “ooh-ahhing” chorus of featured back-ups Linda Ronstadt and Jennifer Warnes.
It follows the macabre progression of a boy of the type that I imagine holding a magnifying glass over an anthill, or taking a BB gun to a squirrel.
He starts out by rubbing food on himself at a public event. We’re assured, though, that he’s “just an excitable boy.” As a youth, he bites an usherette in a movie theatre, and it’s brushed off again as excitable-boys-being-excitable-boys.
Well, as we bop along, the lyrics just get darker and darker, and they don’t hesitate to “go there”. (Perhaps I should’ve provided a trigger warning for today’s entry.)
It’s all totally satiric, though, and it would be pretty hard not to get the joke about a society that rationalizes the actions of its worst offenders.
The punchline, though, is the album cover. Under a photo of Zevon looking sideways at the camera, he’s labelled in red: Excitable Boy.
The lyrics definitely caught me off guard!
Warren Zevon. The trigger warning that walks like a man. Big soft spot for this guy. A great choice.