“We Ended Up Being Friends”: Zac Brown Shares How His Iconic Jimmy Buffett Duet, ‘Knee Deep’, Came About on the Bussin’ with the Boys Podcast

During his new appearance on the Bussin’ with the Boys podcast, Zac Brown chats to Will Compton and Taylor Lewan about how his first collaboration with legendary Gulf and Western trailblazer, Jimmy Buffett, ‘Knee Deep’, came about back in 2011.

The breezy, sun-soaked anthem solidified Zac Brown Band's status as the leading heir apparent to Buffett and Kenny Chesney's island-inspired, beachside thrones.

Brown and Buffett would go on to collaborate again on the wonderfully optimistic ‘Same Boat’ in 2022, with the former then teaming up with Mac McAnally for a moving tribute to Buffett, ’Poets & Pirates’, shortly after his passing in 2024.

When asked about how some of his biggest link-ups have arisen, Brown reflects, “You seek them out. It's like, ‘This is a dream. I want to have Jimmy Buffett on a song’. I ended up meeting him at a campsite, like, he's sitting there eating a pie and me and my bass player are walking by and sit down and start talking to him”.

He underlines how organically the duet came about after that, “We ended up being friends from that, and then I sent him a song, like, ‘Hey, we got a song’. We had traction. We'd already had, you know, five or seven No. 1's at that time. So I think our success and then us being real, genuine fans of him [talked] him into doing it”.

Brown goes on to touch on how another titanic collaboration with Dolly Parton, ‘Butterfly’ - which appears on Zac Brown Band's new album, Love & Fear - came about, “We just released a song with Dolly Parton, it just came out a couple of weeks ago, and she is the best...There'll never be another Dolly. Like, the most published, most brilliant female writer ever. But that was a dream. I mean, it was a dream to have a full orchestra, like 40 people come in, record 40 pieces of an orchestra and put it in. So we did it on the song with Dolly, and she's an angel, man”.

He fondly concludes, “I sent her the song and was like, ’Sing whatever you want’. When I got it back, what she sang, I was just like, ‘She is a f***ing ninja, dude. She is a ninja’”.

‘Butterfly’ is joined on Love & Fear by two more blockbuster duets, ‘Let It Run’ with Snoop Dogg and ‘Hard Run’ with Marcus King’. The eagerly anticipated album - Zac Brown Band's first since 2021's The Comeback - arrives on December 5th, to coincide with the opening night of the group's Sphere Las Vegas residency.

Watch Zac Brown's full interview on the Bussin’ with the Boys podcast below:

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Featured photo by Kendall Wilson