“There’ll Be Some More Jimmy Music”: Mac McAnally Hints at Another Posthumous Jimmy Buffett Project

As we celebrate the third annual Jimmy Buffett Day by raising an ice-cold margarita to the late great Margaritaville icon, we're keenly looking ahead to the prospect of more posthumous music from Buffett. During his conversation with Holler, McAnally confirmed he has plans to work through Buffett's vault of unreleased material.

Over the years, McAnally became one of Buffett's closest friends and collaborators, co-writing beloved songs like ‘Changing Channels’ and ‘Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On’.

McAnally was also a key part of Buffett's first and only posthumous album to date, Equal Strain On All Parts, which arrived in 2023 shortly after the ‘Come Monday’ crooner's death. The project featured an array of gems, such as the quietly hopeful ‘Bubbles Up’.

While chatting to Holler about his friendship with Buffett, McAnally outlined, “We do have some unreleased Jimmy stuff that we plan to finish up - there'll be some more Jimmy music”.

McAnally goes on to make it clear that fans shouldn't expect a multitude of records of new material from Buffett, “There's nothing like the backlog that they speak of with Prince, where he just had hundreds of tracks, or anything like that...We wouldn't have more than one project's worth of extra stuff to release of Jimmy's”.

The Mississippi native fondly recalls how Buffett would always be concise when deciding which songs to include on each new project, “But he was such a charming guy. We'd cut songs, and he'd say, ‘Well, you know, this is enough for this album’”.

McAnally concludes, “So I've got to go back through and make sure that we worked on these things enough to where he would have been happy with them. I haven't really assessed them in that way. Once he decided it's not for this release, we sort of left them to the side. But I actually look forward to the joy of reopening that box and seeing what we have in there. I know a few things are different, but it's definitely lovely. So I'm excited about that. That'll probably come about next year”.

Bearing in mind this conversation took place in 2025, we're hoping this means that McAnally has since had a chance to look through some of Buffett's demos and unreleased songs in 2026, with this next posthumous project hopefully now on the horizon.

One thing's for sure, if you had to choose anyone to have the responsibility of trawling through Buffett's vault of unreleased material and deciding which to share with the world, you'd be hard pressed to find someone more suited to the role than McAnally.

The ‘Two Dozen Roses’ songwriter knew Buffett on a level that few others were fortunate enough to. As McAnally continues his old pal's sun-soaked, island-inspired legacy and strives to “keep the party going” through his Coral Reefer Band live shows, and through his regular Buffett covers with the likes of Zac Brown Band and Kenny Chesney, we're sure that more Buffett music will arrive when the time is right.

Until then, what better way to honour the Gulf and Western legend than with a margarita, a Hawaiian shirt and with ‘A Pirate Looks at Forty’ on the speakers. Sail on, Jimmy.