In the 2010s there was a popular internet meme about the proverbial “Florida Man.” Every so-often you’d see headlines beginning with “Florida man…” and ending with a funny or unusual crime that a man in Florida allegedly committed. These would range from whimsical and relatively harmless (“Florida Man Arrested for Eating Pancakes in Middle of Crosswalk”) to more unnerving (“Florida Man Denies Drinking and Driving, Says Only Swigged Bourbon at Stop Signs.”) The overarching theme of the Florida Man phenomenon is that within this dreamlike land of year-round sunshine and tropical drinks there lies something weirder, something messier, and occasionally something more nefarious.
It is with this Florida Man ethos that Jimmy Buffett approaches the Sunshine State on 1995’s Barometer Soup. Even the title hints at it; the oppressively wet, thick air during the summer can feel like enough to warp your brain chemistry and make you behave in ways you wouldn’t normally behave. The lyrics here trot out a cavalcade of ill-behaved Florida Men. There’s the half-repentant beach bum on “Bank of Bad Habits” throwing a boozy barbecue all night on a public beach, and the picaresque “Ballad of Skip Wiley” wherein the title character sneaks around tourist hotspots like St. Augustine and Disney World doing small time crookery just for the fun of it. Buffett had been romanticizing Florida throughout his early career, but Barometer Soup is not so much a love letter to the state as a late-night “u up?” text. It’s a lurid, prurient exploration of the unsavory elements that undergird the surface-level paradise; it’s looking past the overpriced daiquiri and toward whatever dubious activity may be happening in the AC-free back room behind the resort bar.
Barometer Soup thankfully keeps the mood light and never gets too dark even as it delves into the lives of these troubled and troublesome characters. Like a lot of Buffett music, it’s easy to imagine these songs being sung by a friendly cartoon alligator in a Hawaiian shirt. The last two tracks, the winsome ballad “The Night I Painted the Sky” and rollicking James Taylor cover “Mexico” serve to remind us that it’s all in good fun, and the songwriting is strong enough to qualify the album as a minor mid-career highlight. Barometer Soup isn’t exactly a fan favorite and it never quite got hot enough to burn up the pop charts, but sometimes it’s less about the heat than the humidity.