Jimmy Buffett’s first Christmas album, Christmas Island, originally released in 1996, is being re-released as a vinyl for the first time. You can pick it up in standard black or special edition red.

The vinyl album will release on December 15th.

Buffett’s second Christmas album, Tis the SeaSon, was released in 2016 and is also available on vinyl.

From The Music Universe:

Originally released in 1996 on CD, the platinum-selling Christmas Island hit No. 27 on the Billboard 200 chart, where it spent 14 weeks and ended up becoming one of 1997’s Top 200 albums. Meanwhile, Christmas Island also spent a staggering 81 weeks on Billboard’s Top Holiday Albums chart, peaking at No. 4.

Christmas Island was Buffett’s first Christmas album, his 21st studio album of 32 studio albums total, and boasts a pair of original tunes, “A Sailor’s Christmas” and “Merry Christmas, Alabama (Never Far from Home),” both co-penned by Buffett himself. The album likewise features covers of seasonal classics such as “Christmas Island,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Up on the House Top,” as well as his takes on the Hawaiian-vibed “Mele Kalikimaka” (made famous by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters) and John Lennon’s protest tune-tuned-holiday-hit produced by Phil Spector, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” and more. “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (aka “Twas The Night Before Christmas”), which was a hidden track on the original CD, also appears in these two vinyl versions.

Reflecting on the album and the significance of the holiday in his life, Buffett wrote in the original liner notes: “For those of you who didn’t know, I was born on Christmas Day 1946, the day W.C. Fields died. I think this only goes to prove that God does have a sense of humor, but being born on Christmas was rough going at first. The most obvious scam was to try and double up on presents… It did not sit well with my mother, who made it known, in no uncertain terms to the aunts, uncles and cousins of the Buffett clan strung out along the Gulf coast, that she expected two presents for her bouncing baby boy-one for his birthday and one for Christmas. On the whole it worked quite well, though there were a few Scrooge like occurrences where I would get socks for my birthday and a tie for Christmas. This probably is the reason I never have liked to wear either since.”

Buffett continued, “Christmas Island is a collection of songs, not ladled over with sugary sentimentality and not too far out there in the strange corridors down which my mind sometimes wanders, and I hope it is what you would expect from the Christmas War baby turned island boy born on the day W.C. Fields died.”

Friend of BuffettWorld.com Calen Sifferman has a great new video out with 20 things that even the biggest Jimmy Buffett fans might not know. Check it out below:

Last night during the CMA Awards there were two performances in tribute to Jimmy Buffett. Mac McAnally and Kenny Chesney sang “A Pirate Looks at Forty” and Zac Brown Band and Alan Jackson performed “Margaritaville.”

Watch below:

Billboard has a great read on the making of Jimmy Buffett’s final album Equal Strain on All Parts: “Inside the Making of Jimmy Buffett’s Final Album: ‘He Was So Proud of This One,’ Says Longtime Bandmate Mac McAnally”

“I wasn’t necessarily thinking in terms of this being the last thing he had to say, but I think, in retrospect, he probably was,” says guitarist/songwriter Mac McAnally, who has produced Buffett’s albums with his fellow Coral Reefer Band mate Michael Utley since 1997. “But he never let on. He never surrendered to what was actually happening.”

Buffett, 76, died on Sept. 1 after a four-year battle with skin cancer and lymphoma. “There were people in our organization that didn’t know he was ill,” McAnally says. “He didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him. He just wanted to be this big ray of positivity that he always was. When I went and said goodbye to him the night before he died, he was still smiling just wider than his face.”

After they finished recording in the summer, Buffett kept tinkering with the sequencing, as McAnally realized the beloved singer-songwriter was rearranging the songs to tell his life’s journey. “When he heard the whole album in sequence, he was so proud of this one in a way that I’ve never seen him be,” McAnally says. “And that may be because he knew it was the last one and he got it right.”

Read the full story here.

The final studio album from Jimmy Buffett is out today. Listen to Equal Strain on All Parts wherever you stream music or get it at Amazon or on vinyl at Mailboat Records.

Track listing:

1. University of Bourbon Street (with Preservation Hall Jazz Band)
2. Bubbles Up
3. Audience of One
4. My Gummie Just Kicked In
5. Close Calls
6. Equal Strain on All Parts
7. Like My Dog
8. Ti Punch Cafe (with Angelique Kidjo)
9. Portugal or PEI (with Will Kimbrough and Lennie Gallant)
10. Nobody Works on Friday
11. Fish Porn
12. Johnny’s Rhum
13. Columbus
14. Mozambique (with Emmylou Harris)

Read USA Today’s review of the album: Jimmy Buffett swings from fun to reflective on last album ‘Equal Strain on All Parts’

At the start of the year, Jimmy Buffett began work on what would become his final album.

From January into the spring, the high-spirited raconteur recorded tracks in Nashville, Tennessee, Key West, New Orleans and Los Angeles, a collection of 11 original songs and three covers, including Bob Dylan’s “Mozambique.”

Now, almost exactly two months after the death of the “Margaritaville” maestro from a rare form of skin cancer, Buffett’s 31st studio album, “Equal Strain on All Parts,” arrives with a bittersweet taste.

It’s comforting to know that even as his health declined, Buffett still turned to music and enlisted friends including Paul McCartney, Emmylou Harris and Angélique Kidjo to romp and croon with him.

But it’s also a somber realization that the raucous concert culture and escapism that Buffett enjoyed with his legions of Parrotheads is but a memory. Hazy for some, joyful for all.

The songs on “Equal Strain” follow Buffett’s careerlong blueprint of swinging from frivolous (Billy Currington’s “Like My Dog” and “Fish Porn,” which he co-wrote with acclaimed satirical novelist Carl Hiaasen) to reflective (“Bubbles Up,” Mary Black’s “Columbus”).

Read the full review here.