A camel stands in the desert of Mali in west Africa (a hundred visions and revisions) http://www.flickr.com/photos/phase3/ / CC BY 2.0
Jimmy Buffett releases today his 32nd studio album, Buffet Hotel, a 12-song effort that traverses American cultural history from Marilyn Monroe to his usual travelogue. This time, the 62-year-old Alabama native brings a strong focus on Africa rather than his conventional Caribbean adventures.
The album was inspired by a recent trip Buffett took to the Mali desert for a music festival, according to several news reports. And by the sounds of it, Buffet Hotel echoes back to the songwriter’s best effort during the last 13 years – Far Side of the World from 2002, his last album to be inspired by an African travel experience. Now as then, the album’s full of roots rock and talk about the redemptive powers of exploration such as the song “Wings.” The whole thing has the feeling that you’re out on the Serengeti sitting around a nighttime campfire listening to Buffett (or is it Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt or a thousand other famous storytelling travelers who have crossed Africa) spin old yarns that will have you either chuckle or enwrapped in the titillating details of a tale about what’s over the horizon.
Yet, while Buffett has the chops as a topnotch storyteller-songwriter, he may be at his best on Buffet Hotel with covers of Jesse Winchester’s “Rhumba Man” or the rockin’ opener “Nobody From Nowhere,” written by Buffett pals Will Kimbrough and Tommy Womack. These turned into crowd-pleasers during this summer’s Summerzcool tour, which brings us to an interesting twist for this Buffett album. Buffett slowly unveiled these new tunes during his 2009 tour, rather than wait for the album to be released first before performing. And I gotta tell you, as a Buffett fan, it worked. When I saw the playlist for Buffet Hotel and realized I’d heard a lot of these tunes during the Philadelphia show I attended, it built even more anticipation than the usual for a new Buffett album.
There’s still a some country twang here on material like “Beautiful Swimmers” that will satisfy new Buffett fans who joined the flock when the Gulf Coast troubadour left the Caribbean rock league in 2004 to play the Nashville crowd.
But if you’re a Baby Boomer from the Atlantic or Gulf coasts and grew up during the 1960s filled with California visions listening to the Beach Boys, check out “Surfing In a Hurricane,” which for four and a half minutes revives the surf rock genre. Buffett in his autobiography “A Pirate Looks at Fifty” talked about learning as a teenager to ride the ocean swells on the Alabama shore as a hurricane came a thrashin’, and this song takes him and us to those harrowing moments fighting tides, winds and tornadoes just to catch a wave.
We’re a long way from the height of Buffett’s songwriting days, which came during the 1990s with albums like Banana Wind and Barometer Soup, but Buffet Hotel has enough travel dust on its cover to keep fans enlightened about the world, both Buffett’s and ours.
