How a lifetime sailing the seas helped Jimmy Buffett find his footing in a pandemic

Perhaps it’s a blessing for performer and fans alike that Jimmy Buffett is really the “son of a son of a sailor” he wrote and sang about way back in 1978.

For a person whose reputation as a performer has kept him one of the music industry’s top touring acts since the 1970s despite the shifting tides of taste and trends, Buffett has learned from a lifetime of sea voyages how to navigate being grounded during the COVID pandemic and righting the touring vessel again.

Buffett, who turns 75 on Christmas Day, finds his way back to the stage with his Coral Reefer Band for his first full-scale concert touring presentation since the pandemic began nearly two years ago. Buffett performs Thursday, Dec. 9, at the iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre near West Palm Beach.

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“We were supposed to be here last December, even before that. So it’s been a long time that we were ready to come to Florida. But it sure is good to get back, you know, between everything that’s happened,” Buffett said in a telephone interview with the Miami Herald.

“Everything,” of course, being the global pandemic and it’s ongoing challenges.

“Everybody had to go through the experience,” Buffett said. “There’s a couple things that I take out of it. The first thing was, if you really look back over it and cut through all the bull---- that’s out there and the craziness of the political and everything else that is going on, what it boiled down to me was as somebody that has made their living performing more than anything else until I got lucky in other areas, I always consider that performing is my best quality. And that’s what I really love to do.”

Here’s more of what Buffett has to say about his concert tour:

Q: How do you adjust to no concerts and now life on the flip side, to borrow your title, to getting back out there before full houses on a concert tour?

Buffett: “What happened to me was I sat down and I thought, this is the first time that I can remember — and I’ve only been here 75 years — in the history of the world I can’t remember a time when fun was shut down on the entire planet earth. And I just started thinking that fun is that little piece of contentment that everybody can share, that keeps us from going back into being the tribalistic people from which we came. We can spawn art and literature, those kinds of things. It’s just that little scene between tribalism and not doing anything.

“So when that went away that was a big deal. And so I had to think of it in those terms. As a sailor, I went to my experiences of offshore sailing. When you get over the horizon and now the east coast of Florida coastline goes away and you can’t see Bimini yet, your stressors are that you’re out there by yourself. You better be ready for anything when you do that.”

Q: So you had to be willing and able to adjust, to chart a new course?

Buffett: “That’s just a simple truth about any kind of adventure that you’re going through. I’ve done a lot of long voyages. And you have to get in that mentality. It’s like when you leave land all of a sudden, that’s like when all the sudden they take all of your shows away. You can’t do anything. You’ve got to say, ‘What am I doing now?’ You have to get settled in to where you are.

“It’s a long voyage and you go, ‘Oh, man, what am I doing? I can be at the Coconut Grove Hotel having an eggs Benedict. Why am I out here on this boat in a storm?’ And then that other angel you have on your shoulder says, ‘Shut up and just get in the groove.’

“And then it’s one of the most satisfying things. You run into some hazardous situations out there because that’s part of it. But you get into a groove, which you can handle and not go crazy thinking about it. And that was the most important thing to me — to stay busy. And fortunately, we had avenues in which we could do that. Because we had already created Radio Margaritaville and Margaritaville TV there is always something that was free to the fans that we’ve had and utilizing the technology of staying in touch with fans in other ways when we’re not on the stage.”

Q: How did you feel going from no shows, to special shows for healthcare workers to small venue one-offs, such as May’s Delray Beach gigs, to a private show in Naples in November, to the amphitheater shows your fans expect?

Buffett: “It was some telling and some emotional times, I gotta tell you that. For me and for them. Working our way back from that, or little clubs, it was kind of a microcosm of my whole career. About two years just from going to not being able to play, to being able to play for 40 people, and then get all the way back to where we left off. So that’s a pretty interesting kind of timeline.”

Q: What was that first rehearsal like in California with the Coral Reefer Band?

Buffett: “Mike Utley lives out there. Mac McAnally and Eric Darken were on Zoom and when we started playing in about the middle of the first song we broke down crying. It was just that emotional to all of us. You know, this is what we do, from 50 years of doing this. That’s my other family. That band. People live vicariously through music — whether they’re having fun or whether they’re listening to something emotionally alive. That’s what all music does.

“Like Elton John [on “The Lockdown Sessions” project] said, he was doing kind of the same thing. Those of us who are performers, we couldn’t play in front of a live audience but we could perform in a pretty good way thanks to the technology of the time.”

Q: Taylor Swift, 31, wrote, recorded and released two full-length new studio albums during the pandemic, which seems remarkable at a time when albums are not in fashion. And then here’s Jimmy Buffett doing nearly the same with the release of “Life on the Flip Side” in May 2020 and the acoustic “Songs You Don’t Know By Heart” album of revisited deep cuts a few months after. You and Taylor know how to use your down time well, huh?

Buffett: (Laughs). The first song I wrote for “Life on the Flip Side” was “Slack Tide” and it came to me in the Bahamas, just as I was listening to a Paul McCartney song on “Egypt Station.” I would talk to him later about a line in there. I said, can I have that line?

“I just thought slack tide as a fisherman, and as somebody that knows the water, and the Keys, that all the creatures in the world and those that live in the shallows, when the slack tide comes everybody quiets down. Predators and prey. They get a little breath, you know. It’s a little like nature’s way of kind of taking a break here. And then when the tide starts to move again, and everybody else starts getting back to what they do, I just thought that that was a great metaphor for what we needed at the time with the pandemic and what was going on in the world and the politics and everything. Just take a breath here, people. So that was the whole point of the record.

“And people said, “I don’t know about this. There’s nobody out there buying records.’ And I said, ‘No, they need this record. I need to get it out, too.”

Q: Will Thursday’s concert in West Palm Beach and subsequent tour dates include material from the new albums?

Buffett: “We take five to seven new songs off both of those albums on the big shows and rotate them around and there’s no lack of recognition or energy with the 12 songs I’ve got to play. When you play “Book on the Shelf’ people love when we end the show with that. ‘Slow Lane’ is in the show. And ‘Mailbox Money’ is one of my favorite songs because I wrote that about one of my friends in Mobile. So I can’t wait to play that one in Alabama when we go back there [in June].”

Q: Venues are taking precautions so that tours like yours are possible again. What are you seeing out there?

Buffett: “The ability to have fun, let yourself go is everywhere there’s any kind of performing going on. It’s the other edge of the bubble. There’s a bubble up there and I find that everybody’s climbing back on that. It reminds me a lot of Bob Hope and the Second World War doing those USO tours. People don’t forget it. And you know, look, the way I’ve lived my life, as lucky as I’ve been, I’m going to go back and help wherever I can.”

If you go

▪ Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band performs at 8 p.m. Thursday at iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre at 601-7 Sansbury’s Way, near West Palm Beach. Tickets range from $36 for lawn space at iTHINK to $186 for platinum-level floor seats, but resale tickets are over a grand. Get tickets via Buffett’s website at jimmybuffett.com/events or via LiveNation.