It appears a new Jimmy Buffett Christmas album is in the works. In the same article about “Margaritaville” being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, a sound engineer spills the beans:

Alan Schulman, who has been engineering and mixing Buffett recordings since 1997, agreed with McAnally’s assessment.

“It has a lot to do with a lifestyle,” Schulman said. “It projects the sun, the ocean flip-flops. He kind of lives like that. He’s a fun man to be around. I think what it does is it gives people a chance to have a different lifestyle from their normal jobs a couple times a year, to go to a Jimmy concert and feel like they’re on the beach.”

Schulman said he was just booked to engineer a new Buffett Christmas album.

Jimmy’s first and only holiday album, Christmas Island, was released in 1996.

(hat tip Jeff)

Mac McAnally has a new album out and is giving it out digital copies for free this holiday season. Go to Mac’s website to download the album.

From Mac:

Happy Holidays everybody. I’m working all the way up to the day or two before Christmas but want to touch base before then with all you folks who do me the honor of following my microscopic career. Thank you for the gift of putting in the work required to do so.

Now for the reciprocity part…

Everybody who knows me knows I do not possess the qualities required to be a salesman and I am writing today to re-enforce that fact.

I have a new CD (AKA NOBODY) which some of you have already purchased (thanks so much) and with it comes a bit of a dilemma.

This is my 12th Studio album and I am especially proud of the work my friends (Jimmy Buffett, Kenny Chesney, Zac Brown, Chris Stapleton, Sonny Landreth, The Coral Reefers and the McAnally Daughters ) and I did …. From writing to recording and performing I think it represents the best efforts of my God Given Limitations.

And since I don’t have it in me to ask anyone to buy it.. and since I spend (by choice) the bulk of my working life in the service of artists other than myself….

I want to give it to you.

I am not a man of great wealth but I can at least offer you something that I value and hope it brings something good to you and yours.

From now until January 4 you can have the whole project with the Digital artwork just by clicking on the link. If you already bought one Thank you so much. Feel free to download it again and give it to someone else.

I ask for nothing in return. If you are on my website you have already gifted me with your attention. I would love to hear what you think of the music good or bad as I intend to keep playing and singing for the rest of my life and your input will contribute to my attempts to improve, both as a musician and a human being.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

I hope to see you all soon.

– Mac

P.S. I’m a writer and a musician, so I want everyone to know that I’ll be paying all the royalties due from all these free downloads. No pickers and singers and writers will be harmed in the process. I’m happy to do it. I hope I have to go into savings.

Mac McAnally has a new album out today entitled AKA Nobody.

Gulflive.com has an article on Mac and the new album:

“Music still lights me up like a light bulb,” McAnally told countryweekly.com, recently. “I wake up thinking about it and I go to sleep thinking about it and I write songs in the middle of the night. If I am two lines short in a song, I lie down and know that I will have them by the time I wake up in the morning. It’s no superpower or anything, but it does give me the confidence that my conscious and my subconscious are in line with one another, because we definitely co-write all the time.”

And even in the midst of creating a prodigious body of behind-the-scenes work, McAnally has continued to make his own music. All told, he has recorded 11 albums, including his latest.

On “AKA Nobody” he wrote or co-wrote all but one of the songs. He co-wrote “Coast of Carolina” with Buffett, which Buffett recorded a few years ago, and “Island Rain” with Chesney. Also, “Last but not Least” was originally recorded by the Zac Brown Band several years back.

He also teamed up with legendary artists such as Sonny Landreth, Chris Stapleton and Al Anderson among others for the tracks on the album. The one song on the album that he didn’t write, “Mississippi Your on My Mind”, was penned by the late, great Jessie Winchester, yet another long-time Mississippian.

“I’m grateful for everything that I have been fortunate enough to experience in my life,” McAnally, who is currently in Paris, France with Buffett and the rest of the Coral Reefers, added. “I’m very proud of both the work and that my fans continue to follow my little career. Small though it may be, it’s one of the biggest blessings ever. In the past 25 years people have been gracious enough to ask me to do stuff, and I’ve never been able to say no. I enjoy not being able to say no.”

Read more at gulflive.com.

Get the album now at iTunes or at Mailboat Records.

Jimmy Buffett’s last studio album, Songs From St. Somewhere (2013), included the Toby Keith duet “Too Drunk to Karaoke”. Around the same time that the pair recorded that song, they also recorded “Sailboat For Sale” for a later Keith album, and the time has now come.

Toby Keith will release his next studio album entitled 35 MPH Town on October 9th, and “Sailboat For Sale” with Buffett is listed as the 8th track on the record.

Don’t forget to get tickets to one of Buffett’s fall shows!

(hat tip HavanaMatt)

In an interview with the Macomb Daily ahead of his Detroit show on Thursday, Jimmy Buffett talks about how the internet has changed the way fans get their music and how he himself might get new music to fans.

“Will we do another album? I don’t know the answer to that,” Buffett, 68, says by phone. “We’re just trying to find the system where the next batch of new music goes. It’s certainly not like it was when I started out, or for most of my career, for that matter.”

Yet Buffett acknowledges he’s still a fan of the traditional album, and he’s confident his fans feel the same way.

“For me, an album is just about adding something; if you like this, you can add it to the collection,” he explains. “I’m not out there trying to win hits or chase Grammys or (stuff) like that. I’m just trying to stay in the game at our level.”

Buffett sees the potential for using the digital world to his advantage, too — such as live or filmed streams of him and the band in the studio working on new music, and possibly investing the Parrotheads in the process.

“We can have ’em in there watching us make it, and they can say what songs they want — that’s the kind of thing I’m looking at,” he says. He also hopes that seeing an album being made will make fans more apt to actually buy it when it comes out.

Read the full interview here.