“Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett

"Margaritaville" drifted out of Jimmy Buffett's seventh album, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, in 1977, a song named for the margarita and steeped in the lazy, sun-baked ease of life in the tropics. Buffett wrote it alone and Norbert Putnam produced it, keeping the arrangement loose-limbed and breezy, more hammock than dance floor.

It gave Buffett the highest-charting solo single of his career, number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the Easy Listening chart, and it came to define him: a hits collection winked at it with the title Songs You Know by Heart: Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hit(s), and a 2017 stage musical, Escape to Margaritaville, borrowed its name. The Grammy Hall of Fame took it in 2016, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2023.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.