New Album's Old and I'm Fresh Out of Tunes
Please don't say mañana if you don't mean it
My experience of Jimmy Buffett hasn’t had much to do with the “new album” since 1996’s Banana Wind,1 which remains one of my “go to” studio albums when I’m not listening to a live show. The first time I saw Jimmy in 1998, he’d just released Don’t Stop the Carnival. Neither the album nor the accompanying stage play were a hit — I don’t believe I ever saw him play a single song from the album in nearly 25 shows since 1998 —2 but in true Parrothead form, Jimmy’s millions of fans didn’t mind, given the strength of his catalogue up until that point and our love for the man.
Before he passed, Jimmy was working on a new album called Equal Strain on All Parts, which he named after his grandfather’s description of a nap. As the founder of the world’s leading napping Substack, I’d been looking forward to his telling us more about this. My Google searching hasn’t yielded any further explanation of the title, so I’m hoping we’ll learn more upon its release.
One of the few things I know about the album is that he and Paul McCartney collaborated on a song called “My Gummy Just Kicked In.” I wonder if the final product will somehow resemble Warren Zevon’s posthumously released The Wind, another fine tribute to a criminally overlooked singer/songwriter. All I know is this: for the first time in all my years as a fan, I’m excited for the new album.
I also love 2004’s License to Chill, though given all of the duets, it doesn’t quite feel like a true Buffett album to me.
By nature of the Jimmy Buffett concert experience, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly how many you attend. It’s also nearly impossible to say with certainty that I’ve never seen any songs from Don’t Stop the Carnival since 1998 — if you ask my friends, we’ve never seen him play “Southern Cross” live, despite the fact that we (possibly) saw him play it at least 10 times.