Diehard Jimmy Buffett fans may have been wondering about Buried Treasure, a release of lost-then-found songs from his earliest days, but the world finally gets to hear volume one of the release tomorrow when it sees light via Mailboat Records.
The sizable collection of demos recorded to quarter-inch tapes was found during a cleanup after legendary Nashville producer Buzz Cason sold his recording studio to Martina and John McBride. There were over 125 songs in the piles of tape in the boxes, and now you can hear the last song on the 11-track collection, “Close The World At Five.”
READ MORE
Jimmy Buffett in Tampa: five reasons it could've sucked, and five ways we were totally wrong
“There is not a show that goes by where we are not having a time check, not a soundcheck, a time check,” Buffett explains on a Buried Treasure commentary track. “For 5 o'clock was on my mind years before Alan Jackson called me in 2003 with the idea about an anthem dedicated to quitting time around the world.”
He goes on to explain that the track was written in 1969 and probably had something to with the fact that he worked a 9-to-5 before his night gigs at the Admiral’s Corner in Mobile, Alabama.
“When you keep hours like that, as Willie Nelson says in his song, time will slip away,” Buffett adds. “Time has never really been figured out, although Einstein came close, but it certainly has been a great source of inspiration since the beginning of time. Whether you write lines about losing it, stopping it, travelling forward or backward in it, or just grabbing a cocktail at quitting time, time does not stop. We can’t ever really close the world at five, but I think it helps to think that you can, so let’s think about it.”
Listen to the track below, and learn more about the release here. Call your local record store to see if it’ll carry the release.
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2017.