"Margaritaville" is a 1977 song by American popular music singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett from the album Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes. In the United States, "Margaritaville" reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and went to number one on the Easy Listening chart, also peaking at No. 13 on the Hot Country Songs chart. Billboard ranked it number 14 on its 1977 Pop Singles year-end chart. It was Buffett's highest charting solo single. After Buffett’s death on September 1, 2023, the song re-entered the Top 40 for the week ending September 16, 2023.
Named for the cocktail margarita, with lyrics reflecting a laid-back lifestyle in a tropical climate, "Margaritaville" has come to define Buffett's music and career. The relative importance of the song to Buffett's career is referred to obliquely in a parenthetical plural in the title of a Buffett greatest hits compilation album, Songs You Know by Heart: Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hit(s). The name was used in the title of other Buffett compilation albums including Meet Me in Margaritaville: The Ultimate Collection and is also the name of several commercial products licensed by Buffett (see below). The song also lent its name to the 2017 musical Escape to Margaritaville, in which it is featured alongside other Buffett songs. Continued popular culture references to and covers of it throughout the years attest to the song's continuing popularity. The song was mentioned in Alan Jackson's 2003 single "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere", on which Buffett is a featured artist, and in Blake Shelton's 2004 single "Some Beach".
"Margaritaville" has been inducted into the 2016 Grammy Hall of Fame for its cultural and historic significance. In 2023, the song was selected for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Buffett maintained a resort chain by the same name.
Origins
In an interview with Sound on Sound magazine, producer Norbert Putnam stated Buffett approached him with the concept of an album of light, carefree songs about life by the beach. Putnam encouraged Buffett to record the album at Criteria Studios in Miami, rather than Buffett's usual studio in Nashville, in order to take inspiration from Miami's easygoing beachfront lifestyle. One day during recording, Buffett complained about a bad day he recently had on the beach, which included losing one of his flip-flops on his way home from a bar, cutting his foot on a beer can pop top, and running out of salt for his margarita. Buffett was already working on a set of lyrics about the incident, to which Putnam told him, "That's a terrible idea for a song." A few days later, Buffett played a rough version of the song, then called "Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville," and Putnam and others at the studio realized it had potential as a hit.
Content
The song is about a man spending an entire season at a beach resort community, with three verses that describe his day-to-day activities. In the first verse, he passes his time playing guitar on his front porch and watching tourists sunbathe, all the while eating sponge cake and waiting for a pot of shrimp to boil. In the second verse, he has nothing to show for his time except a tattoo of a woman that he cannot remember getting. In the third and final verse, he steps on a discarded pull-tab, cutting his heel and ruining the flip-flops he is wearing, then returns home to ease his pain with a fresh batch of margaritas. In live performances, he sang "I broke my leg twice, I had to limp on back home".
The three choruses reveal that the narrator is pondering his recent failed romance, and his friends are telling him that his former girlfriend is at fault. The last line of each shows his shifting attitude toward the situation: first "it's nobody's fault," then "hell, it could be my fault," and finally "it's my own damn fault." So the overall story that the song tells is not hedonist enjoyment of life in the sun, but rather almost the opposite; it's a man's gradual recognition, while drowning his sorrows in alcohol, that it was his foolish actions that destroyed the chance of happiness with the woman he loved. The appeal of the song is partly the clever way this evolving story is related in just a few words at the end of each chorus.
Buffett revealed during the recording of an episode of CMT's Crossroads with the Zac Brown Band that "Margaritaville" was actually supposed to be recorded by Elvis Presley, but Presley died the same year the song was released (he declined the offer before the song could be recorded).