Jimmy Buffett swings from fun to reflective on last album, 'Equal Strain on All Parts'

At the start of the year, Jimmy Buffett began work on what would become his final album.

From January into the spring, the high-spirited raconteur recorded tracks in Nashville, Tennessee, Key West, New Orleans and Los Angeles, a collection of 11 original songs and three covers, including Bob Dylan’s "Mozambique." 

Now, almost exactly two months after the death of the “Margaritaville” maestro from a rare form of skin cancer, Buffett’s 31^st studio album, “Equal Strain on All Parts,” arrives with a bittersweet taste.

It’s comforting to know that even as his health declined, Buffett still turned to music and enlisted friends including Paul McCartney, Emmylou Harris and Angélique Kidjo to romp and croon with him.

But it’s also a somber realization that the raucous concert culture and escapism that Buffett enjoyed with his legions of Parrotheads is but a memory. Hazy for some, joyful for all.

The songs on “Equal Strain” follow Buffett’s careerlong blueprint of swinging from frivolous (Billy Currington’s “Like My Dog” and “Fish Porn,” which he co-wrote with acclaimed satirical novelist Carl Hiaasen) to reflective (“Bubbles Up,” Mary Black’s “Columbus”).

Steel drums dance unfettered throughout “Ti Punch Café” featuring Kidjo, and the spirit of calypso drives “Audience of One” as Buffett skips through the lyrics, his ever-present smile audible in his delivery.

It’s a fitting coda to an undiminished career, crafted by an original soul.

Here are five of the standout tracks on the album:

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‘University of Bourbon Street’

The opening track of “Equal Strain” spotlights the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in a tribute to New Orleans, Buffett’s land of “Oz,” he comments in the liner notes. “So much of who I am and what I know came from old New Orleans.”

Indeed, the shuffling beat, burping horns, rollicking piano and lyrics that celebrate the music and essence of the city – “I sang on a paddlewheel boat … helped build a Mardi Gras float and smoked a joint with a beautiful hippie” – sound thoroughly genuine coming from Buffett.

‘Bubbles Up’

The poignant song has returned Buffett to Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart for the first time since 1995’s “Mexico” and for good reason. It’s a poem of hope, a lifeline that offers direction “when your compass is spinning and you’re lost on the way,” and some of the most resounding vocals of Buffett’s lengthy career.

A drowsy pedal steel guitar pushes the ballad, which employs a diving phrase as a metaphor for optimism as Buffett reminds, “the bubbles will point you toward home … Know you are loved, there is light up above and joy, there is always enough.”

‘My Gummie Just Kicked In’

Who wouldn’t have wanted to sit in with Buffett and the McCartneys during the party that inspired this playful rocker?

McCartney handles bass on the song while Buffett muses about the “tantalizing, tempting state I’m in.”

It’s a trademark Buffett outing – frisky guitar riff, unrelenting beat and a singalong chorus (“Don’t know where I’m going, don’t know where I’ve been/ All I know for certain is my gummie just kicked in”) – showered in a mischievous grin.

‘Equal Strain on All Parts’

The title track of Buffett’s posthumous release reminds us of his storytelling skills. He details, over gently picked guitar and the whine of a pedal steel, the habits of his grandfather who, after lunch, would take his “combat nap” and “slip away to God knows where beneath his weathered cap.”

There is a weariness to Buffett’s voice in the song paired with the wisdom of age as he finally realizes the meaning of his grandfather’s “parlance.”

‘Nobody Works on Friday’

There are some who would advocate for this merry swinger to become our new national anthem.

Buffett itemizes the ample time off schedules of Europe and Australia while here the “boss man is glued to the camera” to monitor productivity.

While the hooky chorus is a hoot, it’s the perceptive line that, “It took a global crisis to remind us there’s so much more to life than working just a four day week,” delivered staccato style over a marching beat, that sticks.  

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