Details behind “Close Calls” and “University of Bourbon Street” from the new album

From AL.com: Jimmy Buffett’s new album will revisit ‘University of Bourbon Street,’ ‘Close Calls’

Parrotheads, are you ready to revisit some “Close Calls” with Jimmy Buffett? Are you ready to tour “The University of Bourbon Street?”

Longtime songwriting partner Will Kimbrough, whose collaborations with Buffett include “Bubbles Up,” says those are two of the songs you’ll hear on Buffett’s last studio album, “Equal Strain On All Parts,” due out in early November. They’re among several tracks on the album that Kimbrough co-wrote.

“Jimmy wanted to write a song about his brushes with death,” Kimbrough said of “Close Calls.” “And so he told me a couple of stories and I sketched out a song. He changed some of the lyrics.” Buffett collaborator Mac McAnally also contributed, he said.

Kimbrough described the result as “a throwback to his early days, it’s a tongue-in-cheek fast country song, very country.” It features features Stuart Duncan, a Grammy-winning bluegrass fiddler. “It’s fun, it’s fast, it reminds me of something off of ‘White Sport Coat,’” Kimbrough said, referencing Buffett’s 1973 album “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean.”

While Kimbrough didn’t reveal which incidents made the song, Buffett’s eventful life provided a few to choose from. A recent People.com story described three, including one that was the basis of the song “Jamaica Mistaica.” There was also that unfortunate time he fell from a stage in Australia.

“The University of Bourbon Street” also draws directly on Buffett mythology, Kimbrough said. He described it as “a story song about Jimmy’s early years in the late ‘60s in New Orleans, playing in a band on Bourbon Street.”

“And that song is great,” said Kimbrough. “It has the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, guesting on the song. What a thrill for me, a lover of New Orleans music if there ever was one, me, to have the Preservation Hall Jazz Band … trading licks with my guitar at certain moments in the song. [It] just gives me a thrill beyond belief.”

Kimbrough said the making of the song illustrates how energetic Buffett was during the recording sessions for “Equal Strain On All Parts,” held in January. He arrived on the second day of the sessions, after received a treatment for the skin cancer he’d been battling for several years.

They’d already worked up the lyrics. “I took his notes, I wrote a whole song in the style of Allen Toussaint,” Kimbrough said. In the sessions, the band built up the track, and Buffett loved it. But then he went up to his office, and a little while later, called up Kimbrough.

“He said, ‘The track is great, we need to rewrite the lyrics,’” said Kimbrough. “I said, ‘Which part?’ He said, ‘Well, let’s start with the first line.’ So we rewrote the entire lyric to the song, which is a story song, it’s all words. In about 90 minutes we rewrote every single word of the song.”

One snag: the first verse was now about half as long as it had been. Kimbrough ran down to find Mac McAnally and the recording engineer, to tell them the musical track had to be shortened a bit in that one passage. When that was handled, Buffett came in and laid down his vocal.

Then he went through the same process with another song, putting a final polish on the words before singing them.

“This is a guy who has cancer, who got a treatment that day and traveled, he’s re-writing lyrics,” said Kimbrough. “For a guy whose fame and fortune was based around the idea that he doesn’t work, he just lays around drinking rum all day … he could hunker down and work.”

Kimbrough said he’d like to see songs from “Equal Strain” get serious radio play, something Buffett mostly went without as he built his unique career.

“There isn’t really a radio format that plays Jimmy,” Kimbrough said. “I would hope that country radio would play something off this new Jimmy Buffett record, to finally pay tribute to someone who’s such an influence on that genre. And they may or may not.”

“They’d imitate him, they’d talk about him, and they’d go to his shows, but they would never play his songs,” Kimbrough said.

“Equal Strain On All Parts” is set for release on Nov. 3. Three songs have been released on popular streaming platforms.