There didn’t used to be stickers all over Shrimp Boat Sound. Once upon a time, it was just an anonymous chalk white box, a former commercial ice house next to the water in Key West. Tourists would walk right by with no idea Jimmy Buffett had been making records in there since the mid-1980s.

Shrimp Boat Sound has a website now, but then don’t we all?

We tend to mark time by 10s. I took my first trip to Key West in 1994, 30 years ago now. I began working on Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way, in 2014. A whole damn decade ago. It was released in 2017 and timed to the 40th anniversary of “Margaritaville.”

Jimmy died on Sept. 1, 2023, and on Labor Day weekend 2024, almost exactly a year later, I loitered around his old studio while local dignitaries set up for the official Jimmy Buffett Day proclamation. As the Key West High School marching band played a medley of Buffett tunes underneath swaying palm trees, I once again considered the sweep of the journey, from 1971, when Buffett arrived on this quiet-at-the-time little rock, to everything Margaritaville became.

“Who goes tarpon fishing on acid?” Carl Hiaasen asks in All That Is Sacred, a new(ish) documentary focused on those early 70s years and the creative energy that lit Buffett, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane and others.

From that to the high school marching band adding piccolos and all the brass to the songbook, Jimmy Buffett wrote a story that had never been written.

The book I wrote was about change. I guess everything’s about change, really. But the question I began with was this: How did the 14th-biggest hit of 1977 become the Margaritaville Industrial Complex? I thought it’d be a cultural biography, but “Margaritaville” became Margaritaville because of Jimmy Buffett. He was one of one and his charm and his instincts built a world out of his own need to escape.

Margaritaville took him around the world and he brought that world to fans. But the story began in Key West and Key West is where it will always ring truest. Two months earlier, the Key West Art & Historical Society reached out to see if I’d be interested in giving a scholarly talk. They wanted to do something as part of the inaugural Just a Few Friends celebration. I said I didn’t know what that was, but I had recently finished writing an update to A Good Life All the Way, and had been thinking a lot once again about Jimmy, his life and his work.

That update is now available in paperback and ebook. There’s a new chapter and a new epilogue that gave me a chance to once more thank Tom Corcoran. I still haven’t thanked Tom enough. Not sure I’ll ever be able to do that.

The talk? It wasn’t terribly scholarly I don’t think, but we sold out a pretty little theater and had, I hope, a lot of fun. I had fun. I had a blast in the 38 short hours I was in town. Made a few new friends. Saw a few old friends. Got to waste some time in Capt. Tony’s and the Green Parrot and wander the quiet of the side streets and sit in the shade on the Afterdeck at Louie’s Backyard and stare at the sea. There still isn’t any place like Key West.