What did Jimmy Buffett do to Bob Dylan’s song?
Jimmy Buffett’s fame came from his songwriting style that stamped a place and time that ensured one felt the balmy breezes of Florida and the salty sea air of the tropical Caribbean islands even if one never ventured south of New York.
On Friday, Buffett’s team revealed how the performer captured the sound of “Mozambique” through the release of a video and audio single of Buffett covering a 47-year-old Bob Dylan tune.
Call Buffett’s style Gulf & Western, tropical rock, or whatever gumbo country, calypso, folk, pop and rock make when stirred together.
But Buffett, who died Sept. 1 at his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, after a reported diagnosis of merkel cell skin cancer four years earlier, had a way of stamping his carefully chosen covers with his distinct Coral Reefer Band blend that made them Jimmy Buffett songs.
On Friday, two more tracks from Buffett’s posthumous album, “Equal Strain on all Parts,” were released to digital platforms for streaming and purchase.
First up, that cover of Dylan’s “Mozambique” that features harmonies from Emmylou Harris who did the same for Dylan on his original “Desire” LP cut in 1976. The other tune is an autobiographical Buffett original, “University of Bourbon Street,” which pairs the bard with New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
Five tracks from “Equal Strain on all Parts” are now available with the other nine to follow when the album is posthumously released on Nov. 3. The 14-song album was recorded at Buffett’s Key West Shrimp Boat Sound studio and Nashville’s Blackbird Studio.
Dylan’s jaunty “Mozambique” joins “Buffettized” covers of James Taylor’s “Mexico,” Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” that Buffett dotted inside his catalog of more than 30 albums following his early Florida Keys’ classic run of records from “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean” in 1973 to “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” in 1977. The latter featured the 2023 Library of Congress National Recordings Registry entry, “Margaritaville.”
Buffett, his Coral Reefer Band, including fellow songwriter and musician Mac McAnally, and Harris, recorded the song and video in Nashville at Blackbird Studio on a cold day earlier this year, Buffett’s team told the Miami Herald on Saturday.
Cameras catch the musicians bundled for the chill — Buffett in a long-sleeve blue sweater, hands tucked into his pants’ pockets and a light purple scarf draped around his neck that runs the length of the mic stand. Harris sings her parts while clad in a cozy coat and gloves.
The clip, whose smooth music captures the happy island feel of the Bicentennial year original but with new steel drum accents rather than Scarlet Rivera’s violin on the somewhat rawer Dylan version, is interspersed with footage ostensibly of Southern Africa’s Mozambique.
Then there’s the 3-minute video’s money shot — a lump-in-the-throat closing scene of Buffett doing what he once told the Herald in a 2005 interview that he did nearly every morning: surfing.
In the “Mozambique” final shots there’s a beaming Buffett, bounding out of the water onto the beach in a wetsuit, flashing a thumbs up and clutching his surfboard under his arm.