Welcome to Jimmy Buffett Summer

Embrace the dark underbelly of 1970s soft rock

Late last year, the world blessed us with a new Jenny Lewis song. I’ve always liked Lewis. I’m of a certain age where I have a Rilo Kiley song cemented in my mind with a very specific memory* of being young and sad and searching for any morsel of joy, but I like her solo stuff way more. When she put out The Voyager in 2014, I got very Patrick Bateman and found myself saying things like “It’s a departure for her. She’s leaning more into the Americana thing and shedding the indie rock side,” and was even more into her 2019 album On the Line. I could sort of see where she was going with her songwriting, but until I actually heard “Puppy and a Truck” last fall, I didn’t think she’d go full Buffett.

I’d been waiting for somebody to do it, to fire the first shot. To go from the whole yacht rock irony thing to just the sort of straight-up easy listening that makes you wish you had a can of Miller Lite with a koozie around it in your hand, everything is whatever, but at least I’ve got these couple of simple things that make me happy songs. A few artists have done interesting things in that sphere. Drugdealer’s 2019 album Raw Honey is a particular standout in my mind, and the record features Natalie Mering (a.k.a. Weyes Blood), who also explores similar 1970s peaceful, easy feelings with her music. I also like Young Gun Silver Fox. They are basically doing AOR cosplay and I can’t hate on that. But Lewis felt like she was making a statement by singing “My forties are kicking my ass, and handing them to me in a margarita glass.” It was “Welcome to middle-age. Everything is rough. I need to learn to take it easy.” Pure Buffett.

Making fun of Buffett is easy. Anybody who has seen the season seven “Unwindulax” episode of 30 Rock knows what I’m talking about. Buffett is the Florida Keys version of the Eagles in a lot of ways: a working musician made good, and then he made it really good. There’s a reason people a little older than me make fun of Buffett and a lot of his 1970s soft rock contemporaries. I recall the Pavement singer said somewhere he hated the whole “Peaceful, easy feeling” vibe, and in a 2014 interview with Salon, he took the knives out and stabbed all the ‘70s rich guy musicians he had to grow up hearing: “I still hate them. There’s too much -- it’s not even the music ... There’s levels of evil in it to me.” Malkmus and his fellow Gen. X indie buddies were basically my older siblings, so I grew up hearing a lot of this. And while I didn’t agree in my mind, I went along with it out of fear of being ostracized.

But then I got a little older and realized some of my older friends were not only wrong about some things but that some of them also just had some really bad opinions on all kinds of subjects. So I decided it was time to strike out on my own and let my mellow flag fly. There were the obvious ones, like Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan, both of whom had been accepted early by the older millennial indie rock types. I always loved Billy Joel and while some might claim that Warren Zevon was a little too dark and weird to be “soft,” he was drinking from the same waters. Jackson Browne produced his 1976 self-titled album, and everybody from Glenn Frey to Stevie Nicks shows up on it. He started out a little soft, but then moved on to werewolves mutilating little old ladies in London and headless mercenaries out for revenge, so people gave him a pass. But knowing these little things made it a little easier for me to go soft…rock.

But Buffett, man. For some reason that was a whole other thing. His whole schtick is just being chill and laughing it up in the sunshine, a drink in his hand, a bunch of friends hanging out, the sound of the ocean in the distance, you’re all high and just enjoying life and…that’s supposed to be bad. Buffett felt like the final frontier. It was until I started looking at him from a different angle, the real Jimmy Buffett, the guy who, as one Daily Mail headline so succinctly put it, “WAS wasting away in Margaritaville! How the singer ditched Nashville to guzzle mango daiquiris and LSD-laced punch in Key West and was 'tempted' to get into coke-dealing business as he struggled to make it big.”

That, my friends, is awesome. I can get behind that. And it was there that I started really looking at a lot of the music I heard playing from my dad’s car stereo when I was a kid in a different light. Jim Croce, for instance, was an early influence on Buffett, and I’ve always liked Croce. But, again, you had to be a little quiet about that around the punks and Pavement fans. Yet you read anything about the guy, and then listen to his songs, and you start to realize that he was just a working guy, and his job was being a musician. An artist, sure. But guys like Croce, Buffett and really, most musicians that made it big in the ‘70s had to do a lot of bullshit to get to where they were. Croce sadly died at 30 in a plane crash just as his career was really about to take off, but before that, he played wherever he could to whoever would listen. It’s sort of beautiful to me that his biography includes mention of how he got his first long-term gig at a steakhouse in suburban Pennsylvania called the Riddle Paddock. All these guys, Croce, Billy Joel playing piano behind the bar and turning it into his first hit song, even the two guys named Harry from Brooklyn, Chapin and Nilsson, they all wrote these really rich songs, often with complex characters or themes, and their only crime was they made it easy to listen to. Just listen to one of Chapin’s most famous songs, “W*O*L*D*.” It’s the perfect song about a manchild who can’t get his shit together and just at the end he realizes that he’s doomed himself. It’s a really great song.

As for Buffett, I’m no expert. I’m not the guy who can break down why Bob Dylan loves him as much as he does. Though, when I look at Dylan’s list of other favorite songwriters that includes names like Zevon and John Prine, but also Randy Newman, another musician who a lot of us maybe grew up knowing as the guy who did soundtracks to every other movie from our childhood, I start to see it. I understand why these guys are so popular with a certain generation of parents (and now grandparents), because Croce, Joel, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Zevon, but especially Jimmy Buffett, embody a certain ideal. It’s cynical, but maybe back when they were at their peak it didn’t register as such, but it’s a cynicism I can appreciate because the 1970s were, as I’ve been told numerous times, a bummer. The thing that connects a lot of the soft rock I once tried to act like I didn’t enjoy is that the people that made the music had lived through the promise of the 1960s and that hope of a better tomorrow, and when that didn’t come, they were just like “Whatever” about it. They just made mellow songs because people wanted that after all kinds of chaos. And as we approach the summer after, and I have to assume before more, chaos, I’m really trying to embrace that attitude as best I can while still keeping things in perspective and not losing focus on the fact that I want to see things change for the better. You can be of both minds, I think.

*"With Arms Outstretched” on a CD a friend burned for me. It came on as I was driving home after visiting another friend who was being shipped off to Afghanistan. Very weird circa-2002, Bush 2 memory.