Kenny Chesney has recruited a couple of his island friends for his upcoming album Songs for the Saints that will be released on July 27th. All proceeds from the album will go to Kenny’s foundation Love for Love City for hurricane relief in the Virgin Islands.

Kenny and Jimmy recorded a collaboration of “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season” for the album.

“Each one of them has a tie to my life in the islands, but also reflect some piece of what we’re trying to do,” he shared in a recent press release. “Ziggy Marley, and his family’s legacy, holds so much truth for all of the people I know down there. Mindy Smith’s ‘Come To Jesus’ was an album I lived with from morning to night when I was first going down there – and her voice sounds like an angel. And Jimmy, more than the lost shaker of salt, understands the poetry of the islands beyond what tourists see, the life in a way that made a song written decades ago so current. I’m honored they also want to help.”

Here’s the full track list:

1. Songs for the Saints
2. Every Heart
3. Get Along
4. Pirate Song
5. Love for Love City (with Ziggy Marley)
6. Ends Of The Earth
7. Gulf Moon
8. Island Rain
9. Trying To Reason With Hurricane Season (with Jimmy Buffett)
10. We’re All Here
11. Better Boat (featuring Mindy Smith)

Pre-order the album now at Amazon or iTunes.

Jimmy Buffett will perform on the PBS Independence Day program ‘A Capitol Fourth’:

“A Capitol Fourth,” the annual PBS concert on the Fourth of July, will showcase Jimmy Buffett, the Beach Boys, the Temptations, gospel superstar CeCe Winans and violinist Joshua Bell this year.

John Stamos returns as host for the telecast at 8 p.m. on the nation’s 242nd birthday, the program announced Thursday.

Opera great Renée Fleming will perform “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from “Carousel” to honor service men and women. She is starring in the current Broadway revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

Other performers include artist Pentatonix, country singer-songwriter Luke Combs and “American Idol” alum Lauren Alaina. Additional performers will be announced.

The National Symphony Orchestra will perform under the direction of conductor Jack Everly in the concert from the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol.

Buffett will perform with the Broadway cast of “Escape to Margaritaville,” which will start a national tour.

This year will be the 38th annual broadcast of “A Capitol Fourth,” which concludes with the traditional rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” with live cannon fire supplied by the U.S. Army Presidential Salute Battery.

The concert can be heard live in stereo over NPR member stations nationwide, and it will be live-streamed on PBS, You Tube, Facebook and www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth, It will be available as Video on Demand from July 4 to July 18, 2018.

The Jimmy Buffett musical ‘Escape to Margaritaville’ will end its Broadway run on July 1st:

The Jimmy Buffett jukebox musical Escape to Margaritaville has announced a July 1 closing date, ending its Broadway run after just four months.

Produced by Frank Marshall, Mindy Rich, Anita Waxman and Beth Williams, the romantic comedy set in a Caribbean island getaway threatened by an erupting volcano has been a modest earner at the box office since it began previews in February, suggesting that Manhattan is not a high-density Parrothead metropolis. Total grosses to date are $9.7 million.

While some had speculated that the production might hang on through the summer to attract the tourist crowd who are more likely to be Buffett fans, the box office in recent weeks indicated that the show was running at a significant loss, last week slipping to just 33 percent of its potential gross.

Producers have announced a road company kicking off in October 2019 at the Providence Performing Arts Center in Providence, Rhode Island.

Despite some love from the critics for guitar-strumming lead Paul Alexander Nolan, who makes an appealing Buffett stand-in, the production came away empty-handed in Tony Award nominations, which is frequently a sign that an under-performing show’s life on Broadway will be terminated. The fact that it hung on for more than a month after nominations were announced suggests producers are using Broadway as a branding opportunity in the hopes of recouping in the regions.

Escape to Margaritaville will have played 29 previews and 124 regular performances by the time it closes.

A third Latitude Margaritaville active adult community is being planned, this one in the Florida panhandle. The first two announced locations are Daytona Beach and Hilton Head.

From 55places:

Now, they’ve announced the location of the third Latitude Margaritaville, which will be built in Bay County near Panama City Beach in Florida’s Panhandle.

Latitude Margaritaville Watersound will be located in the St. Joe’s Bay-Walton Sector Plan close to the 30A corridor. Minto and Margaritaville Holdings are partnering with The St. Joe Company, which owns roughly 15 miles of frontage property on the Intracoastal Waterway that connects West Bay and Choctawhatchee Bay.

“Minto is proud to work with St. Joe and Margaritaville to bring Latitude Margaritaville Watersound to this beautiful part of Florida,” said Minto’s Latitude Margaritaville Division President William Bullock. “Our audience has been asking for a Gulf of Mexico location, and this is a perfect complement to our other coastal destinations in Daytona Beach and Hilton Head.”

The community is expected to open in early 2020.

Read the full article at 55places.

Jimmy Buffett kicked off his new 2018 Son of a Son of a Sailor Tour on Saturday night at the Sprint Center in Kansas City. (The previous 2018 shows have been billed as a continuation of 2017’s I Don’t Know Tour.

View the set list from the show here.

The Kansas City Star has a review of the show: Maiden voyage of sailor-themed Jimmy Buffett tour is a pleasure cruise in Kansas City

Jimmy Buffett’s nautical-themed concert at the Sprint Center in Kansas City took about 15,000 giddy passengers on a two-hour pleasure cruise on Saturday.

During the opening night of his Son of a Son of a Sailor tour, Buffett, 71, proudly proclaimed that “it’s actually true- I am the son of a son of a sailor.”

The added assurance wasn’t necessary. The storied singer-songwriter is beloved for his shaggy-dog stories, such as the woozy 1977 smash-hit “Margaritaville.”

His devotees are less like fans than members of a colorful cult of gregarious fun-lovers. Many enthusiasts in Saturday’s audience wore wacky costumes or Hawaiian shirts with leis.

Read the full article here.