Over the years, I’ve written appreciations of musical artists who have influenced my writing and creative thinking, from Little Richard to Aretha Franklin to, most recently, Tony Bennett.
The first poets we know about in Western culture were singers and musicians, so the connection between music and literature is ancient and enduring.
Before becoming one of America’s most famous balladeers, Jimmy Buffett worked briefly as a journalist, wrote fiction and nonfiction, and often described his habit of reading poetry. I heard him say in an interview that the secret to his success was that he could write “clever lyrics.”
Buffett produced the kind of music where you could hear and understand those lyrics clearly. That made them easier to remember and sing along with, something I have been doing since I heard the news that the Pied Piper of his fans, called Parrotheads, died. It seemed weirdly inevitable that a man so devoted to the sun and the sea would die from a rare form of skin cancer.
I’ve spent the week listening to the work of Buffett, reading the lyrics, and playing his music on my piano, guitar and ukulele. One effect of this is that I can’t get the songs out of my head, as it turns out, not an unpleasant soundtrack to my dreams.
To my ears, Buffett’s songs fall into several categories:
- The nostalgic, as in “Pencil Thin Mustache”
- The anthemic, as in “Volcano”
- The reflective, as in “Come Monday,” the writing of which, he has said, saved his life
- The playful, as in “Cheeseburger in Paradise”
- And whatever category “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (and Screw)” falls into.
From a writer’s point of view, these categories are most instructive, and get us closer to the mystery of the writer’s voice. Shakespeare sounds like Shakespeare, whether he is writing histories, tragedies, comedies, or romances. Buffett, too, whatever the mood, sounds like himself.
I am going to use a phrase that may sound too highfalutin for a writer who thought of himself as a modern-day pirate, but here it goes: To fully appreciate Buffett, we have to understand the “power of the particular.”
Buffett’s work may be spoken by characters who have virtues and vices, hopes and dreams, who suffer from regret, depression or alienation. In his most famous song, “Margaritaville,” he gives a name to a state of mind, a purposelessness that he names as if it were a place.
None of that matters without the evidence, the showing in support of the telling, the concrete experiences that give form to the abstractions.
He nibbles on spongecake, he strums his six-string on the porch, he can smell the boiling shrimp. He has a new tattoo, but doesn’t remember where it came from. He looks for his lost shaker of salt.
My favorite lyric is:
I blew out my flip-flop
Stepped on a pop-top
Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home.
But there’s booze in the blender
And soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.
So much is going on in those 36 words. Look how the details appeal to the senses. We see the flip-flop and pop-top, we feel the cut, we hear the blender, and can almost taste what it contains. And I can still smell the shrimp.
It’s not just the particular details that make this work. His rhymes are worth noting throughout his songs: latitudes/attitudes; adventure/indenture; and, sure, blender/render. Add to those, the usual poetic moves, such as alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds — booze/blender), and we have an artist who is playing with language for all he is worth.
My first college English professor, the great Rene Fortin, made the case that all poets — and perhaps all writers — are always playing with language, even when the topic is dark or even morbid. In journalism, I would apply this immediately to headline writers who often have to play with words that fit effectively into less space than a haiku.
Even the lead (or lede) of a story can be a kind of poem.
Tom Wolfe, one of the parents of the so-called New Journalism, argued that nonfiction writers can be good storytellers like the best fiction writers, as long as they do the reporting, and as long as they use the strategies that transport the reader, such as scenic construction, dialogue, and showing things from a variety of points of view.
When we take the Who (from the 5 W’s) and put it in a story it becomes a Character. And the way we make a Character in a story come to life is to create a constellation of particular characteristics, details that reveal the status, personality and motivations of a protagonist.
In “Margaritaville,” Buffett offers listeners or readers a buffet of details that define a way of life that, despite its seemingly carefree rhythms, is sung by a narrator in a dark place. That he can find a poetry that helps him, and all of us, escape the pit of despair feels like a kind of magic.
