Jimmy Buffett is so loved today, several years after his unfortunate passing. One would think he was delivering hit albums from the very start of his career. However, that wasn’t actually the case. In fact, Buffett had popped out a whopping 20 or so albums before he finally scored his very first No. 1 hit album in the United States. And that No. 1 album was the 2004 delight License To Chill, which was released on this very day in 2004.
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License To Chill is a solid country record. And part of what made it such a hit was all of the country music talent Buffett employed to contribute to the record. The record’s biggest single, “Hey, Good Lookin’”, features a laundry list of talent. Kenny Chesney, Clint Black, Toby Keith, Alan Jackson, and George Strait all contributed.
Those artists contribute to other songs on the album, too. Martina McBridge sang with Buffett on “Trip Around The Sun”, Bill Withers contributed to “Playin’ The Loser Again”, and Nanci Griffith was featured on “Someone I Used To Love”. It’s a star-studded piece of work. And it’s not totally surprising that it became a hit.
What is surprising, though, is the fact that Buffett didn’t have a No. 1 hit album in the US before License To Chill was released. He had been in the industry since 1961. If anything, I suppose this should serve as some inspiration for struggling musicians out there. Sometimes, it takes about 40 years to get the success you want.
‘License To Chill’ by Jimmy Buffett Was a Megahit in the US in 2004
According to Jimmy Buffett himself, getting all of that talent onto his album wasn’t particularly difficult. That doesn’t really surprise me. Who wouldn’t want to work with the chillest guy in the biz?
“Everybody went just right for it, and with that arrangement, which we borrowed from all those kind of wonderful people we had in there, we just decided to put a little bit of a… we call it Buffettizing,” Buffett said in an interview with CMT, referencing “Hey, Good Lookin’” specifically. “We kind of take material that are great songs. We don’t change anything. There’s no chord changes, there’s no modulation. There’s nothing. We will set a tempo and a groove that probably is more of a result of playing it live in front of fans and the energy that our shows run at.”
Despite being mostly an album full of covers, License To Chill sold nearly 240,000 copies in its first week alone. The album quickly hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. To this day, it is Jimmy Buffett’s only album to hit No. 1 in the US.
Photo by Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images
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