It’s The Paul Leslie Hour with a review of Jimmy Buffett’s second album High Cumberland Jubilee, sometimes called the “lost album.” In fact, it’s Buffett’s most obscure LP.
It’s been called the lost album. That’s a pretty good description for High Cumberland Jubilee, the second album of Jimmy Buffett, and if you want to get technical (which let’s face it — we do): It’s actually the first album Buffett set out to make as an album, whereas Down to Earth was just a collection of songs that were recorded to be nothing more than demos.
What most people don’t know about High Cumberland Jubilee is that the songs on this album inspired Buffett and his pal, the journalist Gerry Wood, to write a screenplay loosely based on the lyrics. It never made the big screen, but this part of the story feels like classic Buffett.
The story goes that while on board a train, Buffett and Wood (who would go on to be the editor-in-chief of Billboard magazine) continued to write the script. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the script was handed off to an entertainment biz insider. That was the end of that.
You may be asking, “So, where is that script now?” Who knows? Maybe it will surface.
High Cumberland Jubilee was a concept album
What we do know is that High Cumberland Jubilee was produced by Travis Turk. What I didn’t know, though, is that it was recorded as a concept album. But rather than me explaining it, I’ll let Travis Turk tell you himself.
And what about the second album from Jimmy Buffett, High Cumberland Jubilee? You produced that as well.
“Yes, but that was recorded as an album. We actually had a concept in mind. Both Jimmy and Buzz Cason wrote most of the songs for the album. And so we recorded this concept album from beginning to end. In other words, it’s a storyline that begins with the first take all the way through.
I think it had 12 cuts on it all the way through the 12th cut, although it didn’t do very well. It has some really interesting stuff on it. You had to recall that in that time, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, this was the time of the Vietnam War, flower power, you know, the hippies. So that kind of was where we were.
And so Jimmy wrote about what he knew and that was all of that. So, a lot of the songs that he wrote about were about the war and why we shouldn’t be in Vietnam and the crazy LSD poppin’ kids and hippies and that kind of thing. And it revolved around that, although that wasn’t entirely this album, it did contain some of those elements.”*
For more details on the album review visit:
https://www.thepaulleslie.com/high-cumberland-jubilee-a-reflection-on-jimmy-buffetts-lost-album/