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Category Archives: Music Writing
The 10 Best Jimmy Buffett Songs He Probably Won’t Play On Tour
Florida Times-Union — Jimmy Buffett has scored unimaginable bank as king of an empire that encompasses music, restaurants, apparel, shrimp, tequila, casinos and whatever industry puts blowup pools in the back of pickup trucks.
But before he was able to convince untold thousands of concertgoers in suburban amphitheaters and basketball arenas they were actually watching the sun drop in someplace like Tahiti, Buffett really was a struggling, easygoing and fairly well-lubricated storyteller from the Gulf Coast, a guy who came up in the early ’70s singer-songwriter golden age of John Prine, James Taylor, Steve Goodman and countless others.
It’s tougher to find that side of Buffett onstage after decades of sold-out cheeseburger parties, but it’s not impossible: For decades he’s ended his beach blanket blowouts with a solo acoustic number (we call it the Let’s Get The Hell Out Of Here Before These People Get In Their Cars song), his best chance to retune his guitar, rummage around in the song trunk and revisit some of the softer, simpler corners of the catalog. If you’ve gotten your fill of the songs you know by heart, here are a few lost treasures worth digging up.
Read more at Jacksonville.com.
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Interview — Mac McAnally: Buffett’s sideman has some stories he could tell
Island Packet — Mick Jagger has Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen had Clarence Clemons. Jimmy Buffett’s onstage foil/sidekick has for decades been a very large, congenial ginger named Mac McAnally.
With a massive helmet of Hagar the Horrible-thick hair, dry-rubbed Southern wit and considerable tallness, McAnally does not exactly fit into the Caribbean-escapist vibe conjured up by Buffett’s beach blanket blowouts.
But since the 1990s, the Mississippi native has served as Buffett’s onstage counterpoint, guitarist and producing and writing partner. (He also has, during performances of “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” served as Alan Jackson.)
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Nighttime incontinence, bug infestations and Bryan Adams In Your Pants: The 15 Least Sexy Sex Songs About Sex
What could turn A Lady on more than doughy fiftysomethings with exposed white fishbellies and facepaint?
Metromix — Spoiler alert: This list is going to end with a 1996 Bryan Adams song called “I Wanna Be Your Underwear.” It was Adams’ inexplicable panties-transfiguration compulsion that got us thinking: Any website can hope to rack up page views by putting the phrase “songs about sex” in a headline, but it takes a site full of trained professionals to do the exact opposite. As such, our criteria here were simple: The songs had to be directly sexual in nature, they had to not be by comedians or parodists (i.e. Lonely Island doesn’t count) and they had to be at least partly designed for the actual seduction of a human.
Read, and then wash your hands thoroughly.
Here’s to you, Jimmy: A salute to Buffett’s enduring appeal
Indianapolis Star — For many years my mom hung a framed towel that Jimmy Buffett threw at her in her living room.
This is actually not that big of a deal. Jimmy Buffett has also signed autographs for my mom, indirectly fulfilled a song request for my cousin, joked with us backstage at “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” about the showers at Deer Creek (“You should see the Port-A-Potties,” my brother shot back, brilliantly) and graciously played for us more than 30 times. (The towel, incidentally, was thrown at us in a 1998 Detroit concert and actually caught by said brother, who basically Spider-Manned himself across three seats to make sure he caught it, lest we suffer the indignity of going home without a towel full of Coral Reefer sweat.)
It goes on like this, the stories and memories and inside jokes about a man whose arguably biggest hit, “Margaritaville,” was released 34 years ago. If I have to choose, if there’s only time and budget for one trip home a year, I will without hesitation pick the Buffett show over relative silliness like “Christmas” or “Thanksgiving.” I know it, my family knows it, and everyone is extremely cool with this arrangement.
Click here for the article at the Indianapolis Star.
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Elgie Stover, “What’s Going On” and a truck full of Carolina’s finest barbecue
Hilton Head Monthly — Like most writers, I guess, I have a file on my computer called “Story Ideas.” It’s basically a to-do list of things I will probably never do. It’s full of ideas that are pushed aside for work, or parenting, or sleep, tiny flashes of inspiration that arrive during a drive or a lunch and are addressed sporadically in the creative spaces between dishes and running and making sure your magazine gets out somewhere near deadline. My list, for years, has had “Elgie Stover” on it.
Elgie — who passed away last month, didn’t know me and wouldn’t have had the remotest clue why I’m writing about him — was one of those sharply drawn characters that we Midwestern expats encounter here in the Lowcountry and have trouble believing are not fictional. How else could you explain a guy who would show up at perfectly irregular intervals, produce some of planet Earth’s finest barbecue and spin tales about how he came to appear on one of the most loved and acclaimed albums in music history?
As my memory has it — and I warn you that most of the following is clouded by time and beer, mostly beer — I first encountered Elgie very late at night. At the time, more than 12 years ago, I was part of a small crew of lively and extremely broke journalists who would generally end our drinking nights at the inexplicably still-shuttered building that housed the old Blue Nite Cafe, where we knew some guys in the band.
The band usually closed down about 2 a.m., and Elgie would materialize at about 2:04. He’d roll up in this monstrous white truck, which in my memory was about two stories tall, and he’d be towing a monstrous and very elderly-looking black smoker, which in my memory was approximately as long as a football field. We’d gather on the porch outside the bar like children. And he’d open the grill and this giant white puff would burst out and he’d come walking through the smoke and we’d feast and feast and feast. OK, it probably didn’t go like that at all, but I’m sticking with my image, because I like it.
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Interview: Gillian Welch on perfectionism, fireworks and why even metalheads think she’s dark
Metromix — Gillian Welch is a band, one that features Gillian Welch on vocals and guitar and partner Dave Rawlings on guitar, and that is how Gillian Welch has worked for years.
It’s the honey voice of Welch that usually first pulls listeners into the duo’s spare, warm songs. But nearly two decades into a friendship forged at the Berklee College of Music over a shared love of very old music, Welch and Rawlings have evolved into an extraordinary duet machine, one that blends crackling acoustic music, Appalachian folk traditions and bluegrass into an effortlessly rich rural sound.
Such synergy is hard to maintain in real life and harder to maintain in music (we’re still not entirely sure if Simon and Garfunkel like each other). But part of Welch and Rawlings’ persistence as a duo comes their perfectionism and pragmatism. “We’re perfectionists of a certain stripe,” she says. “We’ll take all kinds of haphazard and accidental things in recording, but with the songwriting I feel like we inhabit this really sparse, almost puritanical world, and there just isn’t very much that fits in that world.”
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Inappropriate Music My Second-Grader Likes, Vol. 1: Dropkick Murphys
GateHouse — For about five years, I’ve struggled in vain to understand why my now-second-grader likes the random, totally disconnected assortment of songs he does. (I have also struggled to understand why he doesn’t like milk in his cereal and how the sentence “JUST GO GET DRESSED” can be so apparently difficult to process.)
In his early years, my Kid Playlist consisted of age-appropriate-enough fare — Bob Marley, Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions record and pleasing old-timey stuff like “Beans and Cornbread” — music suited mostly to circumnavigating the southeastern United States in preposterous and doomed attempts to get him to engage in one of these “naps” we kept hearing other parents rave about. (“Wait, these weird leaking marshmallowpuffs SLEEP?” my wife and I would think, in rare moments of lucidity buried deep within months-long clouds of Folgers-powered hallucinations, “In the DAYTIME?”)
These days, however, it’s a little easier. I can tell if he’s going to like a song if it’s by the Dropkick Murphys.
The Murphys, for the benefit of any non-music-nerd readers (Hi, Mom! He’s fine, please stop worrying), are a group of Boston-based Irish punks that looks like it makes records in the rare moments when it’s not smashing Sam Adams bottles over the heads of bespectacled stick-figures like yours truly and shouting unprintable things at Jeter (pausing now, to cross two things off of my List Of Exceedingly Obvious Boston References). Singer Ken Casey has a voice that sounds like it’s being dragged down a gravel driveway. “This band makes me want to run fast,” my son says. I’m listening to them now in the coffee shop, and it’s taking a considerable amount of discipline to not smash my laptop on the tile floor and pick a fight with a neighbor, which is good, as many of them are old, and this is my wife’s computer.
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The Top 13 Musician/Comedian Combos (Intentional or Otherwise)
Do it, do it with your hair.
Metromix — Usually, it goes like this: An actor has a hit movie, gets famous, surrounds himself with parasitic hangers-on who can’t say no, eventually asks one of them, “Hey, so I should start a band, right?” and waits for that person to not say no.
The results, of course, are usually pretty funny, and yes we mean you Scarlett Costner Willis Bridges Crowe God We Could Just Do This All Day Couldn’t We. But what about the other side; the side when musicians team up with legitimate funny people in order to create actual hilarious, out-of-nowhere and occasionally once-in-a-lifetime moments of crossover comic absurdity? Here is Metromix’s guide to the 13 funniest (intentional or otherwise) musician/comic pairings—proof that it’s often best to just go along with the joke. Read more.
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