Songfacts®:

• Written and originally recorded by Warren Zevon, "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" first appeared on his self-titled album in 1976. It became a hit when Linda Ronstadt covered it the next year. In the '70s, Ronstadt had several hits originally recorded by other artists, including "You're No Good" and "Heat Wave."
• Typical of Zevon's songwriting, this is a pretty crude and risqué song. His character is such a disaster that he can't even kill himself: he puts his head on the railroad tracks, but the train doesn't run anymore. He then meets a girl and engages in some sadomasochism.
  
  Ronstadt's cover is a cleaned-up version with the gender reversed. Her character still fails at suicide, but the S&M references ("I met her at the Rainbow Bar, she asked me if I'd beat her...") are gone. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mike - Santa Barbara, CA
• Ronstadt shared her thoughts on this song in a 1978 interview with Sounds: "To me that song seemed like the purest expression of male vanity. Step on you, be insensitive, be unkind and give you a hard time, saying can't ya take it, can't ya take it. Then if you tease men in the slightest bit, they'll just walk off with their feelings hurt, stomp off in a corner and pout. I mean that's the way men are, I swear. I thought the verse turned around to a female point of view was just perfect. The gender change works perfectly."
• Warren Zevon was well known in the Southern California music scene, where he was championed by Jackson Browne, but little known elsewhere. Ronstadt's cover of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" was his first charting song as a writer, and it helped get him noticed. A few months later his song "Werewolves Of London" became a hit.
• Warren Zevon's version has Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac on harmony vocals and a rollicking piano by Jai Winding. In his I'll Sleep When I'm Dead compilation, Zevon said he wrote the song on a fiddle "while sawing on the open strings," and the last verse he made up in the studio.
• Linda Ronstadt was in the middle of a run of hits when she released this song on her eighth album, Simple Dreams. Her producer was Peter Asher, who also worked with James Taylor. Asher figured out that Ronstadt was more than just a singer, and he valued her input. When he started working with her a few years earlier, that's when the hits started coming.
  
  Ronstadt later ventured, quite successfully, into standards and Mariachi music. She could sing just about anything.
• The Simple Dreams album includes another Warren Zevon cover as well: "Carmelita," which Zevon also released the previous year.