Celebrity deaths generally don’t hit me hard, but Jimmy Buffett’s did earlier this year. I’ve listened to his music basically my entire life, and I’ve been to more concerts than I can count. For as long as I can remember, Buffett always said that he would end his career by playing five nights at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre; alas, he didn’t get to go out that way.
Buffett’s final album, “Equal Strain on All Parts,” was released last Friday, just two months after he passed away following a four-year battle with skin cancer. His longtime bandmate, friend, and co-producer Mac McAnally told interviewer Gary Graff that Buffett didn’t appear to let his mortality guide him during the process of making the album.
“I don’t honestly know if this one was extra-fueled because he felt like it might be the last thing he had to say,” McAnally said. “He never let on how sick he was, which was his nature. He didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him or worrying about him. He led us and he never showed anything besides ‘Let’s do this and let’s make it the best it can be.’”
This isn’t an album review, but “Equal Strain on All Parts” is everything you would expect from a modern Buffett album, which means that Parrotheads like me can enjoy it, while people who don’t love his music may not care for it.
Confession, Part 1: Even though certain tracks came early as pre-orders, I didn’t listen to any of them until the entire album dropped. It just seemed right to listen to it for the first time as a complete album.
There’s one song that feels like the perfect way for Buffett and his fans to say goodbye. “Bubbles Up” is one of those ballads that, had it appeared on any other of his albums, would have still been tender and inspirational. But since it’s on his posthumous album, it takes on an even deeper meaning. It made enough of an impression on me to add it to my regular weekly playlist.
Confession, Part 2: I’ve heard people talk about how that “new” Beatles song “Now and Then” moved them to tears, but I was underwhelmed — or at least just whelmed. On the other hand, “Bubbles Up” made me tear up a bit the first time I listened to it.
“Bubbles Up” is about finding your true north when things aren’t easy. “Buffett had latched onto a technique that novice divers learn,” explains Lawrence Speckler at AL.com. “Being submerged in a dark environment can produce profound disorientation: A person might literally lose track of which way is up. But if they watch which way their air bubbles go, they can reorient themselves. Buffett saw a song in that.”
Related: Farewell to the Pirate: Jimmy Buffett, 1946-2023
It was also the track from the album that Paul McCartney said he loved the most (he played bass on another song whose lyrics his wife inspired), and he called it one of Buffett’s best vocals.
The lyrics to the chorus can give you an idea of how inspirational the song is:
Bubbles up
They will point you towards home
No matter how deep or how far you roam
They will show you the surface, the plot and the purpose
So, when the journey gets long
Just know that you are loved
There is light up above
And the joy is always enough
Bubbles up
“Bubbles Up” was such a meaningful song to Buffett’s co-writer Will Kimbrough that he used it to help veterans with PTSD learn how to express their thoughts and feelings in song.
“Writing ‘Bubbles Up’ had to be linked to my work with combat veterans and first responders struggling with post-traumatic stress, because I do it twice a month, almost every month of the year,” Kimbrough told AL.com. “So it’s constantly in my life. What it mainly does to me, it makes me have perspective. It makes me have a new perspective on everybody I’m with.”
It’s hard to know for sure whether Buffett had his impending mortality on his mind when he wrote and recorded “Bubbles Up,” but I can't help but believe that it was the perfect way for him and his fans to say goodbye to each other.
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