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      Gloria Coates, Composer Who Defied Conventions, Dies at 89

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      A Wisconsin native, she was among the most prolific female composers of symphonies, 17 in all, finding particular prominence in Europe, where she lived.Gloria Coates, an adventurous composer who wrote symphonies — she was one of the few women to do so — as well as other works, pieces that were seldom performed in her home country, the United States, but found audiences in Europe, where she lived much of her professional life, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89.Her daughter, Alexandra Coates, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Ms. Coates composed 17 symphonies, along with numerous works for small ensembles and voice. In 1999, when she was working on her 11th symphony, the composer and critic Kyle Gann wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Coates’s symphonies are dark and sensuous, and distinguished by an imaginative use of orchestral glissandos (gradual rather than stepwise changes of pitch, like slow sirens), which culminate powerfully in drawn-out crescendos.”The glissando continued to be her calling card, Mr. Gann said this week by email.“Gloria owned the orchestral glissando the way van Gogh said he owed the sunflower,” he said. “The slow pitch slides that run across the surfaces of her symphonies and string quartets can be difficult for the performers to coordinate, which has probably made musicians less willing to present her music. But they make it absolutely distinctive and recognizable. And underneath those glissandos there is often a clear discipline of canons, palindromes and other simple musical structures.”“The effect,” he added, “is often like a painting of a beautiful edifice on which rain has impressionistically smeared the surface.”Ms. Coates first came to wide attention when her “Music on Open Strings” was performed by the Polish Chamber Orchestra at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music in 1978. Her work has since received only occasional bursts of attention in the United States — as in 1989, when her “Music on Abstract Lines” was given its world premiere at the New Music America festival in Brooklyn; and in 2002, when New World Records released the first recording of her works on an American label; and in 2019, when “Music on Open Strings” was performed at Zankel Hall in Manhattan by the American Composers Orchestra.In 2021, Edition Peters announced that it would begin publishing her works.Ms. Coates said her music “sometimes is melodic, but often derived from structures of microtones melted together.”“It is a way of thinking of music not as separate tones on a scale, as we have for centuries,” she told The Wausau Daily Herald of Wisconsin, her hometown newspaper, in 2021, “but as sounds gliding through time and space which have their own laws and still have roots in the historical musical tradition.”In 2005, the Crash Ensemble performed her Sixth String Quartet (1999) in Dublin.“Bleak and ascetic, strange and disturbing as her music may be, it’s also got a purity that makes it peculiarly compelling,” The Irish Times wrote then. “It’s not music that’s ever likely to leave even a single listener indifferent.”Ms. Coates and the conductor George Manahan in 2019 at Zankel Hall in New York City, where the American Composers Orchestra performed her “Music on Open Strings.”Jennifer TaylorGloria Ann Kannenberg was born on Oct. 10, 1933, in Wausau. Her father, Roland, was a state senator, and her mother, Natalina (Corso) Kannenberg, worked in weapons manufacturing during World War II and was later a nurse’s assistant.Gloria showed musical inclinations early.“The children in the 5-year-old kindergarten have a rhythm band,” The Wausau Daily Herald reported in early 1939. “Thomas Evenson, Jack Luedtke and Gloria Kannenberg brought drums from home.”By then she was also proficient on the toy piano. By 12 she was creating her own often unconventional music. In 1951, a composition of hers won an “excellent” rating in a national junior composers’ competition. But teachers and contest judges sometimes discouraged her more audacious departures from tradition.She told The Irish Times in 2005 that a key moment in her development came when, as a teenager, she attended a question-and-answer with the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin, who would become a mentor. He told her that it was more important to follow her instincts than to follow predetermined rules.After graduating from high school in Wausau, she studied music and drama for a time at Monticello College in Illinois. She later studied at other institutions, including the Cooper Union in New York and Louisiana State University, which she attended after marrying Francis Mitchell Coates Jr. in 1959 and settling for a time in Baton Rouge. She earned a master’s degree in composition there.She continued her studies in New York, but after her marriage ended in divorce in 1969, she, her daughter and their dachshund boarded a ship for Europe. Ms. Coates, who had studied voice as well as composition, settled in Munich and for a time pursued a career singing opera. But fate intervened.“When I was 7,” Alexandra Coates said by email, “she was hit by another skiing student and was paralyzed in the upper back.”Ms. Coates gave up singing and focused on painting, another interest, along with music. She told The Irish Times that in the early 1970s, amid the terrorist attacks at the Olympics in Munich and the violence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Munich building where she was living was thought to be a possible terrorist target. She moved her music manuscripts out of the building but continued to live there. (Her daughter was living with her father in the United States.) She was, she said, sending a sort of subliminal message to herself.“It was not until several months later that I realized that that music was so important, it was more important than my life,” she said.From then on, music became her primary focus. For years Ms. Coates curated a series in Germany devoted to American contemporary music. Her own compositional output covered a wide range. Her daughter said that for a time Ms. Coates held a job giving tours of the Dachau concentration camp to members of the U.S. Army. Among the works those tours inspired was her “Voices of Women in Wartime,” a setting of writings by women under various circumstances during World War II.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Coates is survived by a brother, Philip Kannenberg; a sister, Natalie Tackett; and a grandson.If her work wasn’t often heard in the United States, critics and other writers admired her originality. Simon Cummings, who writes the contemporary music blog 5:4, said by email that Ms. Coates had set herself apart from other out-of-the-mainstream composers as “one who doesn’t merely surprise or amuse you when you encounter their music for the first time, but who completely knocks you off your feet, and moves you very deeply and powerfully, even if, at the time, you’re not really sure why you’re experiencing such a strong reaction.”In 2014, the Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed called Ms. Coates simply “our last maverick.” More

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      Ghostwriter Returns With an A.I. Travis Scott Song

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      The anonymous artist, who stirred conversation with the A.I. track “Heart on My Sleeve,” has been quietly consulting with executives, while also gunning for a Grammy.Earlier this year, when the anonymous musical creator known as Ghostwriter released an unauthorized track that used artificial intelligence voice effects to mimic the pop superstars Drake and the Weeknd, the fallout was immediate and far-reaching.The mostly original song, “Heart on My Sleeve,” was promptly removed from official streaming services, even as experts acknowledged that its use of A.I. fell into a rapidly expanding legal gray area. But while the major record labels sought to protect their intellectual property and scrambled to prepare for disruptions to come, the track also proliferated on social media, earning millions of listens and helping to inspire a wave of similarly novel compositions.Throughout the aftermath, Ghostwriter stayed silent — at least in public.Behind the scenes, however, the shadowy act and its team were making overtures to the very industry figures “Heart on My Sleeve” had unnerved. In the months since, those behind the project have met with record labels, tech leaders, music platforms and artists about how to best harness the powers of A.I., including at a virtual round-table discussion this summer organized by the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards.“I knew right away as soon as I heard that record that it was going to be something that we had to grapple with from an Academy standpoint, but also from a music community and industry standpoint,” Harvey Mason Jr., a producer who is the chief executive of the Recording Academy, said in an interview. “When you start seeing A.I. involved in something so creative and so cool, relevant and of-the-moment, it immediately starts you thinking, ‘OK, where is this going? How is this going to affect creativity? What’s the business implication for monetization?’”Mason said he had contacted Ghostwriter directly on social media after being impressed with “Heart on My Sleeve.” He added that Ghostwriter attended the meeting in character, including using a distorted voice.On Tuesday, Ghostwriter returned with a new track, titled “Whiplash,” this time using A.I. vocal filters to sound like the rappers Travis Scott and 21 Savage and deliver a message to the industry: “Me and Writer raise a toast,” the A.I. version of 21 Savage raps. “Trying to shadowban my boy/but you can’t kill a ghost.”The song — which was posted to social media platforms like TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, instead of Spotify and other proper streaming services — came accompanied by a statement that called on both Scott and 21 Savage to collaborate on an official release. “The future of music is here. Artists now have the ability to let their voice work for them without lifting a finger,” Ghostwriter wrote. “If you’re down to put it out, I will clearly label it as A.I., and I’ll direct royalties to you. Respect either way.”Representatives for Scott and 21 Savage did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A representative for Ghostwriter, who requested anonymity to not expose those behind the project — acknowledging that much of its marketing power comes from its mystery — confirmed that “Whiplash,” like “Heart on My Sleeve,” was an original composition written and recorded by humans. Ghostwriter attempted to match the content, delivery, tone and phrasing of the established stars before using A.I. components.They added that the Ghostwriter team had recently submitted “Heart on My Sleeve” for Grammy Awards in two categories at next year’s ceremony: best rap song and song of the year, both of which are awarded to a track’s writers.“As far as the creative side, it’s absolutely eligible because it was written by a human,” said Mason of the Recording Academy.He added that the Academy would also look at whether the song was commercially available, with Grammy rules stating that a track must have “general distribution,” meaning “the broad release of a recording, available nationwide via brick-and-mortar stores, third-party online retailers and/or streaming services.”Ghostwriter’s representative said they were aware of the commercial availability requirement.The Ghostwriter team noted in a statement that it hoped to raise awareness about the creative and business possibilities of A.I. voice filters, comparing the technology to the early days of hip-hop sampling or user-generated content on YouTube. It offered examples like the ability to do karaoke in the voice of one’s favorite artist; at-home creators making original music à la fan fiction; or artists’ estates using the filters for posthumous original releases.With guidance from Mason, the Recording Academy and its partners in the industry, the team said it hoped to work with stakeholders to build a platform that ensures artists who choose to license their voice can control how it is used and make sure they get paid when it is.“Ghostwriter really has played an important role here to bring awareness and attention,” Mason said. “We know A.I. is going to play a role in our business. We can’t pretend to turn our back on it and try to ban it.”He added, “I’m not scared of A.I., but I do believe work needs to be done to make sure that things are in place so that the creative community is protected.” More

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      Steve Harwell, Former Smash Mouth Lead Singer, Dies at 56

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      He was a founding member of the band, which broke out in the late 1990s with hit songs like “Walkin’ on the Sun” and “All Star.”Steve Harwell, the former lead singer of the rock band Smash Mouth, which was best known for its 1999 hit “All Star,” died on Monday. He was 56.His death, at his home in Boise, Idaho, was confirmed by the band’s manager, Robert Hayes, who said the cause was liver failure.Smash Mouth was founded in 1994 in San Jose, Calif., and was made up of Mr. Harwell, the guitarist Greg Camp, the drummer Kevin Coleman and the bassist Paul De Lisle. Its first success came with the song “Walkin’ on the Sun,” from the band’s debut album, “Fush Yu Mang” (1997).An upbeat track with a dark undertow, calling to mind both the Doors and contemporary ska-punk, “Walkin’ on the Sun,” with songwriting credits going to all four band members, went into steady rotation on MTV and topped Billboard’s alternative chart.The song’s music video laid out the band’s aesthetic and attitude. Dressed in short-sleeve shirts and shades, with fedoras and soul patches, the four members looked like rougher versions of the image-obsessed retro hipsters depicted in the 1996 comedy “Swingers.” The video features a dance party straight out of a 1960s beach movie and ends with a drag-race crash, with Mr. Harwell — beefy, with tattoos on his arms — behind the wheel.“The question of a particular style never once crossed our minds,” Mr. Harwell said in a 1997 interview. “We didn’t want to be labeled as a punk band, a ska band, a surf band, a rock band, a pop band or a whatever band. We just wanted to be us, Smash Mouth, and leave it to the people to interpret what we are.”The band Smash Mouth in 1999. From left, the guitarist Greg Camp, the drummer Kevin Coleman, Mr. Harwell, and the bassist Paul De Lisle.Bob Berg/Getty ImagesThe band’s big-time crossover came with “All Star,” from its next album, “Astro Lounge,” in 1999. Backed by harder-driving guitars, Mr. Harwell, with a slight sneer, sings an outsiders’ anthem to ignore ridicule and shoot for the moon:Hey now, you’re an all starGet your game on, go playHey now, you’re a rock starGet the show on, get paid“All Star” — written by Mr. Camp, the band’s guitarist — went to No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, the band’s best-ever chart position, and found a lasting audience through movie soundtracks. In 1999, it was used in “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” and two years later the song got its broadest exposure when it played during the opening credits of “Shrek,” the animated hit that featured Mike Myers as a grouchy but good-hearted ogre.The “Shrek” soundtrack — which also featured Smash Mouth’s amped-up version of the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer,” in the closing scene — went double platinum, and the film won an Academy Award for best animated feature. “All Star” was everywhere.“We had no clue how big ‘Shrek’ was going to be,” Mr. Harwell recalled in a 2019 article in Rolling Stone. “We sold millions of records off that alone. The song was reborn again.”Since then, “All Star” has lived on, becoming a rich source for online parodies. Nearly 25 years later, the song has garnered nearly a billion streams on Spotify alone, and the sound of Mr. Harwell’s slightly raspy voice is still linked to the song’s recognizable opening lines: “Somebody once told me/The world is gonna roll me/I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”Steven Scott Harwell was born on Jan. 9, 1967, and grew up in San Jose. He began his musical career as a rapper with the group F.O.S., which stood for Freedom of Speech. With a sound reminiscent of West Coast groups of the late 1980s and early ’90s like N.W.A and Cypress Hill, it released a single, “Big Black Boots,” in 1993. But by then Mr. Harwell was already restless.“Around the time we were about to put out our single, this kid Snoop Dogg came out and changed everything,” he recalled in 2017 interview with the music website Stereogum. “I was at a radio convention in Las Vegas watching MC Hammer, of all people, and I just looked at my manager, ‘I’m tired of all this hip-hop’” — he added an expletive — “‘I want to start an alternative rock band.’”After “Astro Lounge,” Smash Mouth released five more studio albums through 2012, with diminishing levels of success. In 2006, Mr. Harwell was a cast member on “The Surreal Life,” a reality show on VH1 in which onetime celebrities live together; his fellow cast members included Sherman Hemsley of “The Jeffersons,” Florence Henderson of “The Brady Bunch” and Tawny Kitaen, known for her appearances in Whitesnake music videos.Mr. Harwell performing in 2003. “We didn’t want to be labeled as a punk band, a ska band, a surf band, a rock band, a pop band or a whatever band,” he said. “We just wanted to be us.”Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesFor the last decade, Mr. Harwell’s career had been marked by health problems and occasionally erratic behavior. In 2013, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a heart condition, and Wernicke’s encephalopathy, a neurological condition that can affect speech and memory.In August 2020, while many parts of the country were still under major restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic, Smash Mouth appeared at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a huge annual event in South Dakota, and performed before thousands of fans — very few of whom, according to reports and videos of the event, were wearing masks or taking any precautions.Mr. Harwell drew cheers from the crowd — but wide condemnation elsewhere — when he said from the stage, “We’re all here together tonight, and we’re being human once again,” and made a crude dismissal of the viral threat.Mr. Harwell performing with Smash Mouth in Brooklyn in 2015. He retired from the band in 2021. Brad Barket/Getty ImagesIn 2021, Mr. Harwell left the band and retired from performing after a live show in upstate New York during which he was seen slurring his words, using profanity and apparently giving a Nazi salute.“I’ve tried so hard to power through my physical and mental health issues, and to play in front of you one last time, but I just wasn’t able to,” he said in a statement at the time.He is survived by his fiancée, Annette Jones; a brother, Mark; and three sisters, Carla Crocker, Michelle Baroni and Julie Harwell.In 2022, Smash Mouth recruited a new lead singer, Zach Goode, and the group has concerts scheduled in coming weeks, including one on Thursday in Madera, Calif. Mr. Hayes, the manager, said the band was still scheduled to perform there.In a statement on Monday, Mr. Goode said: “I love singing these songs every night and carrying on the spirit of rock n roll in front of the best fans in the world. I will continue to try, in my own way, to honor what Steve and the band have created.” More

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      Steve Harwell: How Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ Got a Second Wind From Memes

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      The track, sung by Steve Harwell, took a winding path to evergreen status that illustrates how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music business.Long before it became a soundtrack nugget and an internet meme, it was just a rock band’s attempt to land a radio hit.But the long path to evergreen status for “All Star,” the 1999 track by the California alternative band Smash Mouth, whose founding lead singer, Steve Harwell, died on Monday at age 56, is an illustration of how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music industry.The song took shape while the group was working on its second album, “Astro Lounge,” after its first taste of success with the song “Walkin’ on the Sun” (1997). The group submitted a batch of songs to its record company and was told: “You’re not done. We don’t hear a single, so keep working,” Robert Hayes, the band’s manager, told Rolling Stone in 2019. Greg Camp, Smash Mouth’s guitarist and primary songwriter, said the song’s lovable-loser theme (“I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”) emerged from fan mail. “About 85 to 90 percent of the mail was from these kids who were being bullied” for being Smash Mouth fans, he told the website Songfacts. “So we were like, ‘We should write a song for fans.’”“All Star” was quickly placed on film soundtracks, including “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” in 1999. (The original music video had clips from “Mystery Men,” a superhero sendup starring Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo, among others.) But the song’s immortality began with its placement in “Shrek,” the 2001 animated favorite starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, where the song plays in the opening credits. The film grossed a total of $484 million around the world, according to the site Box Office Mojo.A decade or so later, generational nostalgia kicked off another level of success for “All Star,” when the children who grew up on “Shrek” began meme-ing on it relentlessly. There was the version made up entirely of samples of Bill O’Reilly saying his name. And the one, from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” with lyrics stitched together from “Star Wars” clips. There were the ones sung by Jon Sudano, a YouTuber, showing him melding the song — sometimes painfully — to hits like Adele’s “Hello” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or with the vocal line maddeningly shifted one beat from the original. And don’t forget the guy who recreated Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” using samples of Harwell’s voice.Perhaps the most popular take was “Mario, You’re a Plumber,” a Mario Bros.-theme adaptation — with actual effort taken to write new lyrics — that has garnered 1.6 million views on YouTube.Those were all iterations of what has become a key avenue for artists to find wide success in a fragmented media environment, with user-generated content ricocheting through social media to propel a new song (see Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road”) or point younger listeners to an old one (Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”).In the case of “All Star,” this process kept an old track alive for years and led to gigs like the band performing a snippet of the song on a Progressive insurance ad in 2020. All of that activity tends to drive listeners back to streaming services, and “All Star” has garnered just under a billion streams on Spotify alone.In an interview with the music site Stereogum in 2017, Harwell expressed the contrasting opinions artists sometimes have about such memes. On the one hand, it’s valuable exposure, and that can lead to money in their pocket. On the other … it’s not always fun to have one’s work flattened into a joke.“It’s entertaining, I get it,” Harwell said. “It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it.” More

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      Jimmy Buffett Died of Rare Form of Skin Cancer

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      The singer’s website said he had Merkel cell carcinoma for four years and died at his home on Long Island.Jimmy Buffett died of skin cancer at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on Long Island, according to a statement on the singer-songwriter’s website.After Mr. Buffett died on Friday at age 76, his site announced the death but did not give a cause or specify where he died. In an update over the weekend, the website said that he had Merkel cell carcinoma for four years. A rare and aggressive form of skin cancer, Merkel cell is diagnosed only about 2,500 times a year in the United States, and until recent years it had carried a life expectancy of five months.Mr. Buffett’s 1970s hits like “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which mingled country-rock with bits of calypso melodies and had wry lyrics about the carefree life of boating and loafing at beachside bars, made him a cult hero on a huge scale.He sold at least 23 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, on par with Jimi Hendrix and the Beastie Boys. And Mr. Buffett’s annual tours — in which he usually appeared barefoot, in a comfy T-shirt or Hawaiian button-down — were hugely successful, drawing millions of fans who sang along, drank prodigiously and called themselves Parrot Heads.Mr. Buffett was one of pop music’s most successful and ambitious businessmen, building a huge empire on the brand of good times and island escapism that he sang about in his songs. That included Margaritaville restaurants and resorts, footwear, drink mixes and a 2018 Broadway jukebox musical, “Escape to Margaritaville.”This year, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion, with $570 million attributed to his tours and recording and $140 million in planes, homes and his shares in Berkshire Hathaway — the holding company whose chairman and CEO is multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett, who had been a longtime friend. More

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      ‘Jamaica Mistaica’: Jimmy Buffett Song Inspired After Plane Sprayed by Gunfire

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      In 1996, the police in Jamaica mistook Buffett for a drug smuggler after he landed his seaplane with the singer Bono and others on board and opened fire on it.Jimmy Buffett’s life evokes images of boozy chill-outs by the beach and a certain carefree calm, but in 1996 the singer’s seaplane came under a hail of gunfire in a dramatic encounter with the Jamaican authorities that inspired a song.Buffett’s song “Jamaica Mistaica” is a laid-back account of a dramatic near-death experience in which his plane, Hemisphere Dancer, was mistaken by the Jamaican authorities for a drug-smuggling aircraft.It’s one of the many tales that have resurfaced after his death on Friday.While on tour on Jan. 16, 1996, Buffett, an avid pilot, had just landed at an airport in Negril, Jamaica, accompanied by Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, of the band U2, when a sudden burst of shots rang out, according to one of Buffett’s Margaritaville websites.“We flew the plane in, got off, and as the plane took off to go get fuel, we were surrounded by a Jamaican S.W.A.T. team,” Buffett said in a 1996 Rolling Stone interview. “I thought it was a joke until I heard the gunfire.”As Bono recalled, according to Radio Margaritaville: “These boys were shooting all over the place. I felt as if we were in the middle of a James Bond movie.”“I honestly thought we were all going to die,” he added.Also on board the HU-16 Grumman Albatross plane was Bono’s wife, Ali, their two young children, and Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records.Later that year, Buffett released his album “Banana Wind,” in which he recounts the story on “Jamaica Mistaica”:Just about to lose my temper as I endeavored to explainWe had only come for chicken we were not a ganja planeWell, you should have seen their faces when they finally realizedWe were not some coked-up cowboy sporting guns and alibis.“Like all things, it made for a good song,” Buffett told The Spokesman-Review in a 1996 interview.“I know that there are times in my life where I probably should have been shot at for a lot worse behavior,” he added. “But on this particular instance, I was innocent. Not even a spliff.”The plane, now an artifact of the Buffett universe, was struck by bullets but nobody was hurt.He later received an apology from the Jamaican government, according to an MTV News report at the time.“Some people said, ‘God, you could have sued them, you could have sued the government,’” Buffett said in The Spokesman-Review interview. “But I went, ‘No, it’s probably karma. We’re even now.’” More

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      Jimmy Buffett Was More Than Just “Margaritaville”

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      There was wistfulness behind party tunes like “Margaritaville.” Buffett helped listeners feel like they’d earned the good times just by holding on.Jimmy Buffett built a pop-culture empire on the daydream of “wastin’ away again in Margaritaville”: just hanging out on a tropical beach, drink in hand, a little wistful but utterly relaxed. The empire’s cornerstone was his 1977 hit “Margaritaville,” a catalog of minor mishaps — a misplaced saltshaker, a cut foot — that were all easily soothed with “that frozen concoction.”It’s a countryish song with south-of-the border touches like marimba and flutes, a style jovially summed up as “Gulf and Western.” It’s a resort-town fantasy of creature comforts close at hand and, of course, it’s a drinking song. Buffett leveraged it into a major brand for restaurants, resorts, clothing, food and drink, as well as a perpetual singalong on his robust touring circuit, where his devoted fans — the Parrot Heads — gathered eagerly in their Hawaiian shirts.Buffett cannily marketed his good-timey image; it made him a billionaire. He came up with wry song premises like the one behind “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which starts as the lament of an attempted vegetarian who can’t resist carnivorous impulses. He brought jokey wordplay to his song and album titles and his band name, the Coral Reefers, and he summed up his career with the boxed-set title “Boats, Beaches, Bars and Ballads.” Country singers like Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson and Zac Brown latched on to his seaside-and-booze themes and acknowledged his influence by sharing duets with him.But Buffett’s songwriting wasn’t all smiley and one-dimensional. “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane,” he sang in “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.” He wrote about characters with sadder-but-wiser back stories, like the 86-year-old who had lost his wife and son in wartime in “He Went to Paris,” the hapless robber in “The Great Filling Station Holdup” and the sometime smuggler in “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” who shrugs, “I feel like I’ve drowned, gonna head uptown.”As a conservationist Buffett also, humorously or humbly, contemplated the power and beauty of Nature in songs like “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season”; its narrator writes a song as a storm moves in, but also worries, “I can’t run at this pace very long.” In “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On,” from his 2006 album “Take the Weather With You,” the singer looked back on what Hurricane Katrina had done to New Orleans.The backdrop to Buffett’s party tunes is often one of relief, not entitlement. He sings about mistakes, regrets, work, longing, nostalgia and, beginning decades ago, the inevitability of aging: “I can see the day when my hair’s full gray/And I finally disappear,” he sang on his 1983 song “One Particular Harbour,” a staple of his live sets.So the drinks and parties and vacations and boat trips, or finally being able to settle down in that place by the beach, became consolations for past troubles — even if those troubles were self-made. Buffett helped listeners feel like they’d earned the good times just by holding on long enough to enjoy them. The party was justified — reason enough to order another round. More

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      Jimmy Buffett, ‘Margaritaville’ Singer, Is Dead at 76

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      With songs like “Margaritaville” and “Fins,” he became a folk hero to fans known as Parrot Heads. He also became a millionaire hundreds of times over.Jimmy Buffett, the singer, songwriter, author, sailor and entrepreneur whose roguish brand of island escapism on hits like “Margaritaville” and “Fins” made him something of a latter-day folk hero, especially among his devoted following of so-called Parrot Heads, died on Friday. He was 76. His death was announced in a statement on his website. The statement did not say where he died or specify a cause. Peopled with pirates, smugglers, beach bums and barflies, Mr. Buffett’s genial, self-deprecating songs conjured a world of sun, saltwater and nonstop parties animated by the calypso country-rock of his limber Coral Reefer Band. His live shows abounded with singalong anthems and festive tropical iconography, making him a perennial draw on the summer concert circuit, where he built an ardent fan base akin to the Grateful Dead’s Dead Heads.Mr. Buffett found success primarily with albums. He enjoyed only a few years on the pop singles chart, with “Margaritaville,” his 1977 breakthrough hit and only single to reach the pop Top 10.“I blew out my flip-flop/Stepped on a pop-top/Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home,” he sang woozily to the song’s lilting Caribbean rhythms. “But there’s booze in the blender/And soon it will render/That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”Mr. Buffett’s music was often described as “Gulf and western,” a nod to his fusion of laid-back twang and island-themed lyrics, as well as a play on the conglomerate name Gulf and Western, the former parent of Paramount Pictures, among other companies.His songs tended to be of two main types: wistful ballads like “Come Monday” and “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and clever up-tempo numbers like “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Some were both, like “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” a 1978 homage to Mr. Buffett’s seafaring grandfather, written with the producer Norbert Putnam.“I’m just a son of a son, son of a son/Son of a son of a sailor,” he sang. “The sea’s in my veins, my tradition remains/I’m just glad I don’t live in a trailer.”The Caribbean and the Gulf Coast were Mr. Buffett’s muses, and nowhere more so than Key West in Florida. He first visited the island at the urging of Jerry Jeff Walker, his sometime songwriting and drinking partner, after a gig fell through in Miami in the early ’70s.“When I found Key West and the Caribbean, I wasn’t really successful yet,” Mr. Buffett said in a 1989 interview with The Washington Post. “But I found a lifestyle, and I knew that whatever I did would have to work around my lifestyle.”Mr. Buffett had an affinity for sailing, and his songwriting was greatly influenced by his laid-back life in Key West.Gems/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe locales provided Mr. Buffett with more than just a breezy, sailing life and grist for his songwriting. They were also the impetus for the creation of a tropical-themed business empire that included a restaurant franchise, a hotel chain and boutique tequila, T-shirt and footwear lines, all of which made him a millionaire hundreds of times over.“I’ve done a bit of smugglin’, and I’ve run my share of grass,” Mr. Buffett sang of his early days trafficking marijuana in the Florida Keys in “A Pirate Looks at Forty.”“I made enough money to buy Miami,” he went on, alluding to his subsequent entrepreneurial pursuits. “But I pissed it away so fast/Never meant to last/Never meant to last.”His claim to squandering his wealth notwithstanding, Mr. Buffett proved to be a shrewd manager of his considerable fortune; in 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion.“If Mr. Buffett is a pirate, to borrow one of his favorite images, it is hardly because of his days palling around with dope smugglers in the Caribbean,” the critic Anthony DeCurtis wrote in a 1999 essay for The New York Times. “He is a pirate in the way that Bill Gates and Donald Trump have styled themselves, as plundering rebels, visionary artists of the deal, not bound by the societal restrictions meant for smaller, more careful men.”(The comparison to Mr. Trump here is strictly economic; Mr. Buffett was a Democrat.)Mr. Buffett was also an accomplished author, one of only six writers, along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Styron, to top both The Times’s fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists. By the time he wrote “Tales from Margaritaville” (1989), the first of his three No. 1 best sellers, he had abandoned the hedonistic lifestyle he had previously embraced.“I could wind up like a lot of my friends did, burned out or dead, or redirect the energy,” he told The Washington Post in 1989. “I’m not old, but I’m getting older. That period of my life is over. It was fun — all that hard drinking, hard drugging. No apologies.”“I still have a very happy life,” he went on. “I just don’t do the things I used to do.”Mr. Buffett in 1991. “Margaritaville,” his blockbuster hit, rocketed him to fame in 1977.Tim Mosenfelder/ImageDirect, via Getty ImagesJames William Buffett was born on Dec. 25, 1946, in Pascagoula, Miss., one of three children of Mary Loraine (Peets) and James Delaney Buffett Jr. Both of his parents were longtime employees of the Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company. His father was a manager of government contracts, and his mother, known simply as Peets, was an assistant director of industrial relations.Jimmy was raised Roman Catholic in Mobile, Ala., where he took up the trombone in elementary school, at St. Ignatius Catholic School. He went to high school at another Catholic institution in Mobile, the McGill Institute.In 1964 he enrolled in classes at Auburn University. He flunked out and later attended the University of Southern Mississippi and began performing in local nightclubs. He graduated with a degree in history in 1969, before moving to the French Quarter of New Orleans and playing in a cover band on Bourbon Street.In 1970 he moved to Nashville, hoping to make it as a country singer while working as a journalist for Billboard. (Mr. Buffett was credited with having broken the story about the disbanding of the pioneering bluegrass duo Flatt and Scruggs.) “Down to Earth,” his debut album, was released on Andy Williams’s Barnaby label that year. It sold 324 copies.Mr. Buffett’s second album for Barnaby, “High Cumberland Jubilee,” went unreleased until 1976, long after he had signed with ABC-Dunhill and recorded “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean,” released in 1973 and featuring the debauched party anthem “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”Mr. Buffett had a fondness for puns, as witnessed by “A White Sport Coat,” an album title inspired by the song “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation),” a 1957 pop-crossover hit for the country singer Marty Robbins. Another album was called “Last Mango in Paris.”The “Margaritaville” restaurant and hotel chains are part of the tropical-themed business empire that Mr. Buffett built.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesMr. Buffett’s 1974 release “Living and Dying in ¾ Time” included a version of the comedian Lord Buckley’s “God’s Own Drunk.” “Come Monday,” a lovelorn track from the record, became his first Top 40 hit.“A1A” (also from 1974) was named for the oceanfront highway that runs along Florida’s Atlantic coastline. The album was Mr. Buffett’s first to contain references to Key West and maritime life, but it was 1977’s platinum-selling “Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes,” with the blockbuster hit “Margaritaville,” that finally catapulted him to stardom. “Fins,” another major single, was released in 1979.A series of popular releases followed, culminating in 1985 with “Songs You Know By Heart,” a compilation of Mr. Buffett’s most beloved songs to date. The record became the best-selling album of his career.Mr. Buffett also opened the first of his many “Margaritaville” stores in 1985. That was the year that the former Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmit, then a member of the Coral Reefer Band, coined the term Parrot Heads to describe Mr. Buffett’s staunch legion of fans, the bulk of whom were baby boomers.A supporter of conservationist causes, Mr. Buffett moved away from the Keys in the late ’70s because of the area’s increasing commercialization. He initially relocated to Aspen, Colo., before making his home on St. Barts in the Caribbean. He also had houses in Palm Beach, Fla., and Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island.In addition to touring and recording, activities he pursued into the 2020s, Mr. Buffett wrote music for movies like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Urban Cowboy.” He also appeared in movies and television shows, including “Rancho Deluxe,” “Jurassic World” and the “Hawaii Five-O” revival in the 2010s, where he starred as the helicopter pilot Frank Bama, a character from his best-selling 1992 novel, “Where Is Joe Merchant?”Mr. Buffett favored wordplay in the names of his songs and albums, like “Last Mango in Paris” and “Jamaica Mistaica,” a sendup song about an incident that involved Jamaican authorities mistakenly shooting at one of his planes.Aaron Richter for The New York Times An avid pilot, Mr. Buffett owned several aircraft and often flew himself to his shows. In 1994 he crashed one of his airplanes in waters near Nantucket, Mass., while taking off. He survived the accident, after swimming to safety, with only minor injuries.In 1996 another of Mr. Buffett’s planes, Hemisphere Dancer, was shot at by the Jamaican police, who suspected the craft was being used to smuggle marijuana. On board the airplane, which sustained little damage, were U2’s Bono; Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records; and Mr. Buffett’s wife and two daughters. The Jamaican authorities later admitted the incident was a case of mistaken identity, inspiring Mr. Buffett to write “Jamaica Mistaica,” a droll sendup of the affair.Mr. Buffett is survived by his wife, Jane (Slagsvol) Buffett; two daughters, Savanah Jane Buffett and Sarah Buffett; a son, Cameron; two grandsons; and two sisters, Lucy and Laurie Buffett.In a 1979 interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Buffett was asked about a previous remark in which he somewhat incongruously cited the wholesome choral director Mitch Miller and the marauding Gulf Coast pirate Jean Lafitte as two of his greatest inspirations.“Mitch Miller, for sure,” Mr. Buffett said, doubtless in acknowledgment of the way his own fans sang along with him at concerts. “In the old days: “Sing Along with Mitch?” Who didn’t?”“But Jean Lafitte was my hero as a romantic character,” he continued. “I’m not sure he was a musical influence. His lifestyle influenced me, most definitely, ’cause I’m the very opposite of Mitch Miller.”Aaron Boxerman More