New York Times Review of Buffet Hotel

[Pleasin & Teasin]

JIMMY BUFFETT - “Buffet Hotel” (Mailboat)

Jon Caramanica - New York Times

For almost four decades Jimmy Buffett has been writing the soundtrack to
a life of weekend jaunts, to cleanse the mind from the drudgery of the
working life — and post-retirement vacations with nothing more pressing
than the hours and which pair of sunglasses to wear while killing them.
There are consequences only for not giving yourself over to leisure.

Certainly relaxation is a key theme of Buffett’s songs, and that is
evident in the words and in the only-half-cocked attention paid to
writing them. There are a handful of elegantly constructed numbers on
“Buffet Hotel,” (named after a real hotel in Mali, hence the spelling),
Buffett’s 28th studio album, and the first following a brief, successful
two-album major-label dance (the duets-heavy “License to Chill,” and
“Take the Weather With You”). But mostly the ones with elegance are
those others wrote (“Life Short Call Now,” by Bruce Cockburn) or the
ones Buffett had help with (“Surfing in a Hurricane,” written with Will
Kimbrough).

While those songs may be crisper, they’re less specific, less Buffettish
in their quirky detail. “Turn Up the Heat and Chill the Rosé,” Buffett
wrote all by himself, because, really, who else could encourage his fans
to “Take off your Uggs and let your metatarsals play!”? Same goes for
the ham-handed poetry (though the melody’s better) of “Beautiful
Swimmers,” which touches on Marilyn Monroe, Renoir, the Aga Khan and
blue crabs from Baltimore.

In his younger days Buffett’s brand of country-rock was soft, and it has
only loosened from there. His voice is perversely inflexible, forever
lilting upward and at this point perhaps best suited to children’s
music. (You can hear it in the few songs here in which he begins
whooping and shouting at the end, like an eager camp counselor.)

The end of the album takes a sharp turn toward buzz-kill, though. “A Lot
to Drink About” is Buffett’s Michael Moore moment, an indictment of the
system that creates the leisure class that embraces him so assiduously.

There’s the price of oil, war of the spoils
Here’s your bucket for the big bailout
Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan
We got a lot to drink about.

But he rescues himself, and his listeners, with characteristic
Buffettian detail: “The truth, wherever it’s hiding/Can’t be found on
Google Earth.” In other words, the basic human need for comprehending
the great crises of our times is just one more goofy quest, a very lost
weekend.