C.M. Kushins

C.M. Kushins works as a journalist, musician, and biographer whose writing focuses on popular music and the complicated lives behind it. Nothing’s Bad Luck is his 2019 biography of singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, published by Da Capo Press with the subtitle The Lives of Warren Zevon. Kushins traces Zevon’s unsettled childhood, early musical ambitions, recording career, relationships, final album, and posthumous Grammy recognition. The book draws on original interviews with figures including Crystal Zevon, Jackson Browne, Mitch Albom, Danny Goldberg, Barney Hoskyns, and Merle Ginsberg, allowing different phases of the musician’s life to emerge through people who knew him. Kushins studied communications at SUNY Empire State College and worked with MTV and the NAACP before publishing the biography. Nothing’s Bad Luck was his first book, and its combination of music history, reporting, and life writing established the subject that would define his early bibliography. The fuller title is important because it identifies both Zevon and the book’s biographical scope.