Will Kimbrough talks about the inspiration for “Bubbles Up”

From AL.com: ‘Bubbles Up:’ For Jimmy Buffett co-writer Will Kimbrough, work with veterans inspired lyrics

Paul McCartney has called “Bubbles Up” a particular favorite among the tracks on Jimmy Buffett’s last studio album, and said he thinks it’s probably the best vocal his friend ever sang. A Rolling Stone writer said its reassuring, uplifting message “takes on new meaning” after Buffett’s death.

None of that was a given when Buffett shared the idea for the song with longtime co-writer Will Kimbrough. But Kimbrough said he had an instinctive feeling what the song needed, and it was something that he later worried might keep Buffett from releasing it. For its sense of salvation to work, it needed some danger. For its sense of uplift to work, it needed some darkness. To be reassuring, it needed to touch on real fears.

Twenty years of collaboration with Buffett influenced Kimbrough’s thinking, as you’d expect. But so did something you might not expect: Years of helping people battered by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – soldiers and first responders – by teaching them to use songwriting as an outlet for their grief, depression and anger.

That’s why, on one of Jimmy Buffett’s last songs, you find him singing simply and sincerely, and not just sticking to the friendly image of bubbles dancing upward to the light of the surface. “We’re just treading water each day,” he sings at one point. “Sometimes living’s a struggle,” he says at another.

imbrough hails from Mobile, the same city where Buffett grew up. He’s a Nashville journeyman whose many outlets include songwriting, guitar playing and producing. Aside from his solo work, he’s an accomplished sideman who appeared as an honorary member of Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, and who regularly tours with Alabama native Emmylou Harris (who has performed “Bubbles Up” as a tribute to Buffett.)

Kimbrough recently dedicated an episode of his “Super Service” podcast to the backstory of “Bubbles Up.” In a subsequent interview with AL.com, he dove even deeper.

On the phone, Kimbrough adds that the biggest thing he learned from Buffett was to trust himself. Trust was a lesson that Buffett taught by example. He trusted Kimbrough enough to send him unfinished songs, and ideas for songs that hadn’t even been started. When the recording sessions began in January for the album “Equal Strain On All Parts,” he wasn’t there on the first day. He let longtime collaborators Mac McAnally and Michael Utley start setting things up.

“I cannot underline more heavily the trust involved in the process,” Kimbrough said. “Jimmy trusted the Coral Reefer Band and he trusted his producers and bandleaders. And he trusted his co-writers. He trusted me a lot as it turned out, and I’ll never forget that. And in the most positive way I’ll never get over that, I will treasure that, that trust that was given to me by this guy, this kind of giant of entertainment, this successful mogul running an empire [who] reached out to me and trusted me. And that has taught me to trust myself more than I did before.”

“None of this is going to make me rich,” Kimbrough said. “But it makes me rich in a better way. Which is, I’ve learned to listen to myself and trust myself. When someone asks me for something, and I’m interested in the project, I can give 100% of myself without fear. I trust myself and my ideas. I know they aren’t the best ideas, they’re just my ideas. My voice is not the best voice, but it’s my voice. … That’s a great place to be.”

Kimbrough said he knew, over the last few years, that Buffett was being treated for some kind of serious health concern. He’d make occasional references to traveling to Boston or Houston to get “zapped,” and sometimes sessions would be scheduled around these appointments. But Kimbrough didn’t push for details.

As that situation developed, and especially once the pandemic began to interfere with in-person get-togethers, Buffett honed his system of songwriting collaboration. He’d send notes, outlines, even impressionistic sketches to convey how a song should feel. Kimbrough said it was like receiving “storyboards of songs.” And it worked, he said, because Buffett was “a great communicator.”

“I’m perfectly comfortable with that because I live on the move,” said Kimbrough. “I have for 40 years. I trust my co-writers. If I don’t, then why would I write with them? I don’t have to be in the same room to make sure they don’t mess up my song.”

That “storyboard” process is how the idea for “Bubbles Up” first came to Kimbrough. Buffett had latched onto a technique that novice divers learn. Being submerged in a dark environment can produce profound disorientation: A person might literally lose track of which way is up. But if they watch which way their air bubbles go, they can reorient themselves. Buffett saw a song in that.

All Kimbrough had to do was turn the notion into a song. And he knew that whatever Parrotheads might want from their favorite troubadour, that song had to touch on trauma.

‘Pralines on My Pillow’

Over the last five or six years, Kimbrough has become increasingly involved in programs that teach people suffering from PTSD to use songwriting as an outlet. One is called “Songwriting With: Soldiers.” The other is the Warrior PATHH program, which incorporates songwriting sessions as an element of an approach called Post-Traumatic Growth. He was leading sessions and workshops before COVID-19 hit but committed more time to it during the pandemic.

“Writing ‘Bubbles Up’ had to be linked to my work with combat veterans and first responders struggling with post-traumatic stress, because I do it twice a month, almost every month of the year,” he said. “So it’s constantly in my life. What it mainly does to me, it makes me have perspective. It makes me have a new perspective on everybody I’m with.”

“It’s not that I’m teaching them to write a song,” he said. “You can’t teach somebody how to write a song, because everybody in the world already knows. Everybody’s already made up a song when they were a little kid. You just bury that freedom under your duty, obligation, shame, shyness, whatever it is. So I try to bring that back out in people and remind them that their everyday language is a like treat for me. … The everyday language of someone telling me their own truth.”

“That kind of work gets under your skin,” Kimbrough said. “You’re being gifted with people’s stories. Not that that’s why I do it, but in the end, that’s what you get. You do it because you’re interested in the process, then you fall in love with the people. You fall in love with the veterans, you fall in love with the first responders.”

“They’re the ones who make it powerful. I just scoop up the words” and show them how to transform those into lyrics, he said. “I can’t not use that, because it’s such a part of me now. I do way more of that than I do co-writing in Nashville trying to get a cut. I’ve never had a Nashville cut, not one. And I’m not bitter about it, I’m just telling you that I guess I’m not that kind of writer anymore.”

The aquatic concept of “Bubbles Up” dovetailed with that. “I have worked with a lot of people who felt like they were drowning in the effects of post-traumatic stress,” said Kimbrough.

“When I sat down to write, I had just come back from a Post Traumatic Growth songwriting workshop with combat veterans and first responders,” he said. “So I had been with people who had experienced great trauma and were struggling with it in their lives, often on a life-and-death basis, whether it was suicide attempts [or] the wreck and ruin of their careers and families. It’s a very sensitive work but I’ve learned how to do it. I also was sort of reeling from the news of the child of some friends who had died at a very young age. So those things were on my mind. I also knew that Jimmy had been receiving treatments for his illness, at that point, for three, three-and-a-half years.”

All that went into it, more by instinct than by calculation. That’s why you get a Jimmy Buffett tune that runs some risk. That line about treading water is going to hit a little close to home for some. The same with admitting that life is a struggle, and not making a joke of it.

Read the entire article at AL.com: ‘Bubbles Up:’ For Jimmy Buffett co-writer Will Kimbrough, work with veterans inspired lyrics