Jimmy Buffett Found Paradise on Earth

His job was just beach. His art, his science, his philosophy, his religion, his ethos, his billion-dollar brand: beach. Just beach. “No man is an island entire of itself,” wrote John Donne; “If we couldn’t laugh / We would all go insane,” sang Jimmy Buffett, who died Friday, of skin cancer, at 76, “surrounded by his family, friends, music and dogs,” per a post on his Twitter account, which added, “He lived his life like a song till the very last breath and will be missed beyond measure by so many.” That collective grief, that camaraderie, that interconnectedness: Of course that’s what “No man is an island” means, but also, no man was more of an island than Jimmy Buffett, a cheerfully boozy and poignantly serene walking vacation of a man where all were welcome and nobody ever had to leave.

You want to do the Sad, Wistful Song first or the Goofy, Ribald Song? Mmm. Yes. You’re absolutely right.

So you hear that Jimmy Buffett died, and maybe you reach instinctively for 1985’s Songs You Know by Heart, his first greatest-hits collection, though the original album cover styles it “Greatest Hit(s),” the parenthetical a typically wry and self-effacing nod to the fact that at the time, at least, his biggest/greatest hit by an order of magnitude was “Margaritaville,” his wistful and absurdly anthemic 1977 sing-along that forever defined his art/religion/brand. But I put this record on this morning, and really every song was a colossal hit, especially “Why Don’t We Get Drunk,” which I used to bellow with my goofy and ribald teenage friends (the chorus begins, “Why don’t we get drunk and screw,” you see) as we drove around the landlocked Midwest in the mid-’90s. But let me politely suggest that you, also, know all of Songs You Know by Heart by heart, even if you’ve never listened to this record (or any other Jimmy Buffett record) by choice, even if you never caught him live, even if you’re no Parrothead, even if tequila’s not your thing. You still know “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” and you know how he likes his:

I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french-fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer
Well good god almighty, which way do I steer?

A fantastic and exuberantly bellowed bridge that doubles as a dinner (or breakfast) order: That’s Jimmy Buffett. You know “Fins”; you know to clasp your hands over your head and groove from side to side—“Fins to the left / Fins to the right”—during the ecstatic chorus even if you’ve never actually done that.

You know that latitudes and attitudes didn’t rhyme until Jimmy Buffett made them rhyme. You know “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” his gentle and mournful ballad turned autobiography title in which he lamented being born at the wrong time and wasting all the time he did get:

I’ve done a bit of smugglin’
And I’ve run my share of grass
I made enough money to buy Miami
But I pissed it away so fast
Never meant to last
Never meant to last

But that one’s just a song; in reality, Jimmy Buffett spent a solid half century on vacation and didn’t waste a minute of it. Songs You Know by Heart ends with “Volcano,” whose ecstatic and exuberantly bellowed chorus you also know by heart; when it ended, the algorithm served me up Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” and I snorted, just a little, at the sacrilege, at the thought of carefree Jimmy and grumpy old Van as peers, contemporaries, pantheon bros, drinking buddies. But sacrilegious toward whom?

Jimmy Buffett was born in 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi; it’s tempting to go all the way back to his debut album, 1970’s Down to Earth, and posit him as a sardonic, tender, affable, genius singer-songwriter in the vein of Randy Newman or John Prine or Warren Zevon, any of whom would’ve been delighted to come up with a song title like “Ellis Dee” or a line (from the extra-sardonic “Captain America”) like “He’s a do-do-good who loves apple pie and kisses little babies / He’ll guard you against everything from atom bombs to rabies.”

But Jimmy never needed anyone to argue that he was an underrated all-time great; he certainly never aspired to be highbrow. No, he was here for both a good time and a long time, and by the time you could find teenage me ecstatically bellowing, “I just bought a water bed / It’s filled up for me and you” a solid quarter century later, he’d already built his beach-bum empire; “Margaritaville” was no longer just a song, but a whole deceptively chill lifestyle. (Nobody amasses a billion-dollar fortune by being chill, y’know, but Jimmy never let you see him sweat, or at least you assumed that sweat was purely recreational.) Reportedly, his actual, y’know, music accounted for a mere 5 percent of that fortune, but for all its expert frivolousness, the music always mattered, and his house style—breezy, Caribbean-flavored country rock, like the Eagles if they actually took it easy—is still a dominant strain in country music today, even if it was way, way, way more appealing when Jimmy did it.

We can agree, at least, that Jimmy worked tirelessly to earn the pun License to Chill, the title of his 2004 country-superstar-stuffed duets album that exemplifies how hard it is to make life look this easy. (Kenny Chesney, bellowing along on the title track, has himself spent a quarter century or so as an aspiring billionaire beach bum following in Jimmy’s sandy footsteps.) But it’s just as hard to keep the permanent vacation lifestyle from sounding insufferable. Jimmy’s last album of new material, Life on the Flip Side, had the considerable misfortune of coming out in 2020, the least vacation-feeling year in recent history, and yet it landed with a light touch, with a palpable sense of good cheer, with a certain “No man is an island” sense of aspirational togetherness:

With fortune or without it
For paydays or for free
More latitudes than attitudes
More everyone and less me

He sure did love rhyming those words. That’s on a song called “Who Gets to Live Like This,” and the song’s thesis is that everyone does. He makes it make sense. He always did. All right, time for the sad, wistful song.

“The Captain and the Kid” is on his first album, Down to Earth. It’s about Jimmy (he’s the kid) and his beloved seafaring grandfather (he’s the captain). And now, 51 years later, here we’ve got Jimmy and his daughter Delaney talking about it before Jimmy once again croons his way through it. Good luck not tearing up at this part:

He’s somewhere on the ocean now
A place he oughta be
With one hand on the starboard rail
He’s wavin’ back at me

One theory is that Jimmy Buffett’s whole career was a slow evolution from being the kid to becoming the captain, but it’s a little more precise to say that he dedicated his life to proving you could always be both, and that labor and leisure, too, could blur together into an eternal, breathtaking sunset. I keep thinking about how lovely and comforting and communal that phrasing is: “surrounded by his family, friends, music and dogs.” Always an island, never an island. May he rest in peace; may we aspire to the peace with which he lived.