PicoBlog

Jimmy Buffett, who died last week, wrote mostly straightforward songs. One asked, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?”

His narrators tended to let go of deep thoughts. One describes taking off a weekend “just to try and recall the whole year,” but abandoning the effort: “Ran into a chum / with a bottle of rum / and we wound up drinking all night.”

The songwriter himself described it all as “pure escapism,” and the emotions expressed are often simple and sweet. He loves his daughter. He misses his wife while on a short trip. These sentiments may explain why fans find his music so relatable, and also why the New Yorker observed in 2022 that “awards and critical acclaim have largely eluded him.”

Like the waters of the Gulf, however, things go on beneath the surface. Some Buffett songs offer escapism in the sense that his characters seem to be escaping from something, not always successfully.

“A Pirate Looks at Forty” is the lament of a man approaching middle age. He was born “two hundred years too late” to be the pirate that he feels he is. He has managed only to “run my share of grass,” which “made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away so fast.”

Then this happens.

I have been drunk now for over two weeks
I passed out and I rallied and I sprung a few leaks
But I got to stop wishin', got to go fishin'
Down to rock bottom again
Just a few friends, just a few friends

Having a drink is one thing. Staying drunk for two weeks, passing out and falling toward “rock bottom again” does not sound good! Buffett doesn’t seem to think so, either. The narrator confesses to the two-week binge without any hint of a party vibe; the song suddenly sounds urgent.

Buffett’s most famous tune, “Margaritaville,” chronicles of the gentle pleasures and struggles of beach life (“I blew out my flip-flop / stepped on a pop top”). But why, exactly, is the narrator off drinking by himself?

Wasting away again in Margaritaville
Searching for my lost shaker of salt
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know
It’s nobody’s fault

So he says in the first refrain. By the time the refrain comes around a second time, he’s beginning to settle on a suspect.

Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
Now I think
Hell, it could be my fault

A moment later, the refrain lands for the third and final time.

Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know
It’s my own damn fault

He is taking responsibility for himself.

Is the narrator hinting at some failure that left him here drinking margaritas “all season”? Is he just feeling that he’s wasting too much time?

Buffett leaves out the answers, if any exist. In real life, as his obituaries noted last weekend, he eventually cut back on the alcohol and excess. Without apologizing for the past, he chose a different path than the one his first-person narratives depicted. He built an empire on his music instead—a brand based on good feeling.

The hints of pain in the songs made the feeling stronger. In an NPR interview, the singer Diana Krall once told me that she loved jazz standards—the music of the Depression and World War Two—because happy songs often referred to the sadness in the world outside the cabaret. Complexity can make a story relatable and human. Jimmy Buffett’s best music has it.

Thanks for reading Differ We Must, my companion to the book of the same name, which you can preorder to receive October 3. I make no attempt to connect Jimmy Buffett with Lincoln, although Lincoln considered himself a boatman, who twice crewed cargo vessels down the Mississippi to New Orleans. They would have found something to talk about.

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