Liner Notes:

Anybody for Dessert?

There are a few species here on Earth that are comfortable going against the grain, but it seems that human beings like to keep moving forward. If you stop and think about it, bicycles are not made to peddle backwards; you don’t surf up a wave and it is certainly easier to walk down a hill than trudge up one. We all tend to be more excited about things that are in front us (better known as the future) than behind us (that would be the past). Maybe it is because when you do look back, you get some idea of the speed at which this planet and out individual lives are really traveling.

It is sometimes very hard to conceive of having been doing this summer job for nearly four decades. If you think that seems like a long time to be under the brightly colored lights, than multiplication can really get your head spinning when you begin to add it all up. Without doing the math (for as you know “Math Suks”) that is a lot of shows, a lot of cities and a lot of songs.

I have never really bothered with statistics, but one of the websites that actually keeps tabs on statistics and facts in my world lists over 600 songs that I have either written, co-written, recorded or sung. In today’s world that would be over 2 gigabytes, which could fill up an iPod Nano. However, I still consider myself far from, as the last verse of One Particular Harbour says, the place where “I see the day when my hair’s full of grey and I finally disappear.” No no no-BUT NOT YET.

First of all, I consider myself not grey at all but rather “Arctic blonde.” However, as we are allowed to keep rolling along by our loyal followers, some days the whole thing does kind of remind me of “The Sorcerer”s Apprentice” portion of “Fantasia” in which Mickey Mouse fights a losing battle with the broom handle bucket brigade until he wakes up and figures out that it is all a dream – and I think how lucky I am to be living a dream. But dreams are also work. Every year, there comes a point when I have to figure which silver of that ever-growing pie to dish out to the hungry and happy legions that thankfully still like what is on our menu. I tell you, it is a long way from the days when we ad to play three shows a night and would actually have to repeat songs in the third show, simply because I hadn’t written enough to fill three set lists.

It is quite comfortable for me to compare a show to a meal. Now when I think about it, it makes perfect sense: first there is an appetizer or two, a couple of side dishes for the table, the main course and then dessert. I don’t know about you but dessert has always been my favorite, and somewhere back at the beginning of the 2008 “Year of Still Here” tour, I had this idea that we would offer a little more in the way of dessert than we had done in previous years. What I had in mind was to go back through the ever increasing number of songs and hopefully pick out a few fine poetic plums or choice rhythmic cherries to serve up, and not too heavy on the topping.

“Encores” is a collection of well known and not so well known songs that I think provide a happy ending to a musical meal. It is of course, the desire of any performer to do a show that leaves the audience begging for more. That is basically what an encore is by definition, but I would take it a little further than that. In putting it together, my original thought was to just make a collection of these moments. Once assembled and listened to as a set, it came to me, that it is probably the longest encore in history; but in these difficult days in difficult times, maybe a whole bunch of happy endings is really not a bad thing. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed singing them.

-One Love, Jimmy Buffett
Honolulu, Hawaii
January 21, 2010