It's fashionable in tiki circles to hate on Jimmy Buffett, and I can sympathize. His "brand" has gotten way too commercial, and the few times I've visited a Margaritaville location, I found them to be crass and noisy and couldn't leave fast enough. To make matters worse, they present a bastardized interpretation of tiki that begins and ends with thatch and drunkeness. That said, I'm a fan of Jimmy Buffett. I don't count myself as a Parrothead, however, but am rather more of a Church of Buffett, Orthodox type. I find his early songwriting fascinating, before he started writing every album specifically for that group of fans who demand to hear "Margaritaville" on constant replay. Case in point: "Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season" which is a masterful vignette that is a deft exercise in evocative scene-setting that conveys character, emotion and environment through the use of spare, precise language. The detail puts me there, on that beach. I smell, see, hear and feel everything that's happening, even though much of the detail in the song is merely implied. Amazingly, nothing much happens in this song--it's an interstitial, taking place between the bender the night before, and the storm yet to come. That he could so effectively make something out of nothing is a testament to his songwriting skills of the era.
So yeah, I'm sick of winter already. Bring on summer!
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