Author: Stacy Loves Buffett
Landfall is defined as an arrival at land after a sea or air voyage. Or in the case of hurricanes and tropical storms, as the intersection of the eye of the storm with the coastline. For the most part, storms lose some of their vigor once they have made landfall, but that isn’t always the case. I think Jimmy’s song version can be seen to include a little bit of all of the above, or like many of his songs, have the ability to change in meaning depending on the perspective and mood of the listener.
Fruitcakes! It’s an album title, a song title and a badge of honor! In an earlier post I mentioned that this album was my first new release that I purchased as a Parrothead. In the previous year, I had first acquired the greatest hit’s CD, Songs You Know By Heart, and several others which had previously been released. But Fruitcakes, well I knew it was going to be released, and I waited for it eagerly. And that beautiful CD was worth every penny that I spent on it…
Ah, this song! It is a bit of a tender anthem for Parrotheads everywhere, especially the ones who have ripened past forty, or fifty, or who are even more ripe. And probably for those who are still far, far away from one of those milestones that life hands us. I mean, I loved this song long before I had even crossed the meridian into my twenties.
There are a few songs that, while Jimmy did not write, he certainly embraced and made his own, and that his fans embraced and made part of Parrothead lore. Southern Cross is one of them, and it’s absolutely worthy of fitting into the vibe that Jimmy’s music and life gifted to us.
Captain James Delaney Buffett Sr was born in Nova Scotia in 1887 and died in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1970. He was certainly a huge influence on Jimmy, and I imagine the rest of the Buffett family. The Captain And The Kid isn’t the only song that Jimmy writes about him in, but I believe it is the first. It is a beautiful tribute!
While JB has proved multiple times that he can write a song about rather ordinary, everyday circumstances, he also had quite unusual, extraordinary things happen to him. And of course, he wrote songs about those things too…
As Jimmy got a little older and a little more settled in his career, people might claim that he and his music got a little weird, a little quirkier, but I present you 1974’s Life Is Just A Tire Swing from the album A1A, and say that Jimmy was always Jimmy, and stayed true to himself to the end.
Living in the face of such storms must take a lot of breathing in, breathing out, and moving on. It’s hard to win against mother nature but we certainly can keep our heads up and keep trying. And it’s not just physical storms we face, it’s the storms of life.
This song was on JB’s 1974 masterpiece album, A1A. The song was never released as a single but it is absolute poetry set to music. It’s soft yet gritty; about storms and hangovers and Bloody Mary’s for solace, and the beauty of inspiration and song writing.
This song has an interesting back story. The America’s Cup is a yacht racing tournament that was first held in 1851 hosted by the British Royal Yacht Squadron. It was a race won by the New York Yacht Club with the schooner America. The trophy was named after the schooner and has been called that ever since.
