Paul McCartney has called “Bubbles Up” a particular favorite among the tracks on Jimmy Buffett’s last studio album, and said he thinks it’s probably the best vocal his friend ever sang. A Rolling Stone writer said its reassuring, uplifting message “takes on new meaning” after Buffett’s death.

None of that was a given when Buffett shared the idea for the song with longtime co-writer Will Kimbrough. But Kimbrough said he had an instinctive feeling what the song needed, and it was something that he later worried might keep Buffett from releasing it. For its sense of salvation to work, it needed some danger. For its sense of uplift to work, it needed some darkness. To be reassuring, it needed to touch on real fears.

Twenty years of collaboration with Buffett influenced Kimbrough’s thinking, as you’d expect. But so did something you might not expect: Years of helping people battered by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – soldiers and first responders – by teaching them to use songwriting as an outlet for their grief, depression and anger.

That’s why, on one of Jimmy Buffett’s last songs, you find him singing simply and sincerely, and not just sticking to the friendly image of bubbles dancing upward to the light of the surface. “We’re just treading water each day,” he sings at one point. “Sometimes living’s a struggle,” he says at another.

Kimbrough hails from Mobile, the same city where Buffett grew up. He’s a Nashville journeyman whose many outlets include songwriting, guitar playing and producing. Aside from his solo work, he’s an accomplished sideman who appeared as an honorary member of Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, and who regularly tours with Alabama native Emmylou Harris (who has performed “Bubbles Up” as a tribute to Buffett.)

Kimbrough recently dedicated an episode of his “Super Service” podcast to the backstory of “Bubbles Up.” In a subsequent interview with AL.com, he dove even deeper.

‘Another escapee’

In the mid-’90s, songwriter Todd Snider was signed by Buffett’s Margaritaville label and toured with him as an opening act. Kimbrough was playing lead guitar in Snider’s band, The Nervous Wrecks, and he figures that’s the first time Buffett got a look at him and heard any of his music. Snider recorded a song co-written by Kimbrough, “Horseshoe Lake.”

In his podcast, Kimbrough recalls playing a Snider show at the Margaritaville restaurant in New Orleans when “Mr. Buffett showed up and sat in with us. And it was pandemonium.” Another time, Snider played Tipitina’s with Buffett and Jerry Jeff Walker joining in. Afterward, the backstage area was jam-packed and Kimbrough wasn’t enjoying himself amid the crush. “I found myself pressed up against the wall and there was Jimmy Buffett next to me, to my right,” he said. “And I looked over and said, ‘Hey, Jimmy, I’m Will Kimbrough. I’m from Mobile, Alabama.’ He looked at me and gave me that smile, and Jimmy Buffett literally had a smile that would light up a room. He smiled, the room lit up, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘You’re another escapee, are you?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I am.’”

Looking back, Kimbrough said he doesn’t think that was a slap at Mobile. He thinks it was just an acknowledgement that they’d both left the security of home to chase their dreams.

It was years before the conversation resumed. Kimbrough worked to eke out a career in music that would support his young family. He released his first solo album, “This,” in 2000, followed by “Home Away” in 2002. He got a gig as a sideman to respected Texas songwriter Rodney Crowell. That meant some reliable paychecks, and he was making a living, “but still there’s no anchor, to sort of give us financial security, at all,” he said.

He got a call from Buffett’s niece, Melanie Buffett, a friend. She said ‘My uncle is asking about you.” She encouraged him to follow up because “when my uncle is interested in someone, things can happen.” He shipped copies of the albums to an address in the Hamptons, and a couple of months later, Buffett’s office called and said he’d like to record two songs from “Home Away:” “Champion of the World” and “Piece of Work.”

“I told my wife, ‘Jimmy Buffett wants to record two songs,’” Kimbrough says in the podcast. “And we jumped up and down like little kids.”

A few months later, in early 2004, Kimbrough was invited to participate in recording sessions in Key West. “I was the new guy, playing on the record. And it was an amazing experience,” he said. He was just “floating on a cloud of happiness.”

“Piece of Work,” featuring Toby Keith, became a track on “License to Chill,” a 2004 album designed to capitalize on mainstream country music’s embrace of Buffett’s beachy themes. It became his first No. 1 album. (“Champion of the World” was later recorded by Little Feat with Buffett as a guest.)

“The album comes out, it goes straight to No. 1 on the album charts … and eventually was a platinum record, a million records sold,” Kimbrough says in the podcast. “So a year later – which is how long it takes for a songwriter to receive royalties from an album they have a song on – I got the biggest check I’d ever gotten in my life. It was great. It didn’t make me rich, but it changed our lives. It meant I was a bona fide songwriter, finally.”

It might have seemed like Kimbrough had won the lottery, but the reality was better. Buffett liked what he brought to the party and kept inviting him back.

“For the last 20 years, he’s reached back out to me for songs for albums,” Kimbrough says in the podcast. “And on every album ever since, there’s been songs that I either co-wrote with him or wrote by myself or with other people. All told, there are 21 songs on the last seven Jimmy Buffett albums that I helped write. I cannot believe I can make that statement, but here I am to make it.”

On the phone, Kimbrough adds that the biggest thing he learned from Buffett was to trust himself. Trust was a lesson that Buffett taught by example. He trusted Kimbrough enough to send him unfinished songs, and ideas for songs that hadn’t even been started. When the recording sessions began in January for the album “Equal Strain On All Parts,” he wasn’t there on the first day. He let longtime collaborators Mac McAnally and Michael Utley start setting things up.

“I cannot underline more heavily the trust involved in the process,” Kimbrough said. “Jimmy trusted the Coral Reefer Band and he trusted his producers and bandleaders. And he trusted his co-writers. He trusted me a lot as it turned out, and I’ll never forget that. And in the most positive way I’ll never get over that, I will treasure that, that trust that was given to me by this guy, this kind of giant of entertainment, this successful mogul running an empire [who] reached out to me and trusted me. And that has taught me to trust myself more than I did before.”

“None of this is going to make me rich,” Kimbrough said. “But it makes me rich in a better way. Which is, I’ve learned to listen to myself and trust myself. When someone asks me for something, and I’m interested in the project, I can give 100% of myself without fear. I trust myself and my ideas. I know they aren’t the best ideas, they’re just my ideas. My voice is not the best voice, but it’s my voice. … That’s a great place to be.”

Kimbrough said he knew, over the last few years, that Buffett was being treated for some kind of serious health concern. He’d make occasional references to traveling to Boston or Houston to get “zapped,” and sometimes sessions would be scheduled around these appointments. But Kimbrough didn’t push for details.

As that situation developed, and especially once the pandemic began to interfere with in-person get-togethers, Buffett honed his system of songwriting collaboration. He’d send notes, outlines, even impressionistic sketches to convey how a song should feel. Kimbrough said it was like receiving “storyboards of songs.” And it worked, he said, because Buffett was “a great communicator.”

“I’m perfectly comfortable with that because I live on the move,” said Kimbrough. “I have for 40 years. I trust my co-writers. If I don’t, then why would I write with them? I don’t have to be in the same room to make sure they don’t mess up my song.”

That “storyboard” process is how the idea for “Bubbles Up” first came to Kimbrough. Buffett had latched onto a technique that novice divers learn. Being submerged in a dark environment can produce profound disorientation: A person might literally lose track of which way is up. But if they watch which way their air bubbles go, they can reorient themselves. Buffett saw a song in that.

All Kimbrough had to do was turn the notion into a song. And he knew that whatever Parrotheads might want from their favorite troubadour, that song had to touch on trauma.

‘Pralines on My Pillow’

Over the last five or six years, Kimbrough has become increasingly involved in programs that teach people suffering from PTSD to use songwriting as an outlet. One is called “Songwriting With: Soldiers.” The other is the Warrior PATHH program, which incorporates songwriting sessions as an element of an approach called Post-Traumatic Growth. He was leading sessions and workshops before COVID-19 hit but committed more time to it during the pandemic.

“Writing ‘Bubbles Up’ had to be linked to my work with combat veterans and first responders struggling with post-traumatic stress, because I do it twice a month, almost every month of the year,” he said. “So it’s constantly in my life. What it mainly does to me, it makes me have perspective. It makes me have a new perspective on everybody I’m with.”

“It’s not that I’m teaching them to write a song,” he said. “You can’t teach somebody how to write a song, because everybody in the world already knows. Everybody’s already made up a song when they were a little kid. You just bury that freedom under your duty, obligation, shame, shyness, whatever it is. So I try to bring that back out in people and remind them that their everyday language is a like treat for me. … The everyday language of someone telling me their own truth.”

“That kind of work gets under your skin,” Kimbrough said. “You’re being gifted with people’s stories. Not that that’s why I do it, but in the end, that’s what you get. You do it because you’re interested in the process, then you fall in love with the people. You fall in love with the veterans, you fall in love with the first responders.”

“They’re the ones who make it powerful. I just scoop up the words” and show them how to transform those into lyrics, he said. “I can’t not use that, because it’s such a part of me now. I do way more of that than I do co-writing in Nashville trying to get a cut. I’ve never had a Nashville cut, not one. And I’m not bitter about it, I’m just telling you that I guess I’m not that kind of writer anymore.”

The aquatic concept of “Bubbles Up” dovetailed with that. “I have worked with a lot of people who felt like they were drowning in the effects of post-traumatic stress,” said Kimbrough.

“When I sat down to write, I had just come back from a Post Traumatic Growth songwriting workshop with combat veterans and first responders,” he said. “So I had been with people who had experienced great trauma and were struggling with it in their lives, often on a life-and-death basis, whether it was suicide attempts [or] the wreck and ruin of their careers and families. It’s a very sensitive work but I’ve learned how to do it. I also was sort of reeling from the news of the child of some friends who had died at a very young age. So those things were on my mind. I also knew that Jimmy had been receiving treatments for his illness, at that point, for three, three-and-a-half years.”

All that went into it, more by instinct than by calculation. That’s why you get a Jimmy Buffett tune that runs some risk. That line about treading water is going to hit a little close to home for some. The same with admitting that life is a struggle, and not making a joke of it.

“I just went ahead and wrote what was in my mind and in my heart,” Kimbrough says in the podcast. “And what I wrote was a song that sounds a lot like the song that got released recently.”

Kimbrough sent Buffett “sketches” of three songs, rough demos recorded on his phone, and got back a note that he’ll treasure forever: “What a wonderful piece of work ‘Bubbles Up’ has become. Watch out, we’re getting good at this. I have only a few lyric suggestions. I will get them to you tomorrow. I did not open up the rest of the songs yet. I saved them, like they were pralines on my pillow to have for breakfast.”

Kimbrough, looking back, pointed out a few in-jokes and subtleties of “Bubbles Up.” For one thing, the open-D tuning of his slide solo was inspired by Duane Allman’s playing on the classic Scott Boyer/Cowboy song “Please Be With Me.” He put the song in three-quarter time as a tribute to the early Buffett album “Living and Dying in ¾ Time.” But he also was thinking of tunes such as Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Early on, he was playing with the phrase “sinking feeling” in the second line. That got changed to “that pressure-drop feeling,” and it’s not just a reference to hurricanes.

“‘Pressure Drop’ is an old reggae song by Toots & The Maytals,” said Kimbrough. “It’s also been covered by The Clash, and my band Ground Zero used to play it at [Mobile club] Dr. Feelgood’s, so I knew exactly what he was talking about.” (Note: Ground Zero performed in the early ‘80s and was a precursor to the better-known Will & The Bushmen.)

“And that was one of the things about Jimmy’s and my relationship, we both loved records and music and world music and reggae and old weird calypso records,” said Kimbrough. “You can hear it in his music, you don’t hear it as much in mine, but I love it and I know it. So we could talk about it … We discovered a rapport in a love of African music and Caribbean music and Hank Williams.”

Even after the recording sessions, Kimbrough worried a little.

“I admit that I had a feeling he was going to come back and say, ‘I love the song but I’m not putting it on the record because Parrotheads don’t want to hear that.’ But it kept coming up. He kept loving the song.”

“Jimmy hasn’t done a song like that with a straight, serious delivery in a while,” Kimbrough said. “He’s always had that smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye and a wink, for many years.”

Kimbrough says in the podcast that he’s heard that in Buffett’s last days, McCartney visited his bedside and that may be where he heard “Bubbles Up” for the first time. He says he’s been told that McCartney played songs for Buffett at his bedside, “which is a beautiful thing to think about, and an amazing thing to think about.”

‘For the Life of Me’

Back in 2021, Kimbrough started pulling songs together for a new solo album – then got really busy with other things. He finally recorded those songs in July and now has a Kickstarter drive up to pay for the production and release of a new album, “For the Life of Me.”

When he first started working with Buffett, he’d released two solo albums. This will be his 11th. His discography includes nine band albums, plus extensive credits on several Shemekia Copeland albums and the seven Buffett albums he’s worked on.

The drive has more than a week left to go, but he’s blown past his $20,000 goal by a wide margin. As of Thursday, pledges totaled $35,768.

Kimbrough says it’s “a very special batch of songs” with “a lot of the Deep South and the Gulf Coast in it.” But it will not include his take on “Bubbles Up.”

“I’ve got a really cool home demo for ‘Bubbles Up’ that will someday come out, or another version of it, though I think the demo is probably the best thing,” he said. “But no. No way. Not when Paul McCartney says this is the best vocal Jimmy ever did, I’m not going to go, ‘Hey, listen to me do it.’”

To put out a recording now would just be tacky, he said. “I’ll do it live. So if you want to hear me do ‘Bubbles Up,’ come to my shows.”

“Someday I’ll probably release it,” he said. “But not now. It’s not time for that. It’s not time for me to butt in. I’ve butted in quite a bit as it is.”

When “Equal Strain On All Parts” comes out in November it’ll include five songs Kimbrough co-wrote with Buffett. Those will be the last fruits of a co-writing partnership that began with “Wings” and “Surfing in a Hurricane.”

“I’ll never find another partner like him,” said Kimbrough.

“If you only know him as a celebrity and celebrity performer, go back and listen to ‘A Pirate Looks at 40.’” Kimbrough said. “Go back and listen to ‘He Went to Paris.’ Go back and listen to ‘The Death of an Unpopular Poet.’ You’ll hear someone who has a wry sense of humor and of course the songwriter’s sense of playing with phrases and words and catchphrases. But also somebody who has a sensitive love for people and their stories.”

“It was and probably still is Jimmy Buffett’s world, we just live in it,” said Kimbrough.

“Equal Strain On All Parts” is due for release on Nov. 3. “Bubbles Up” and two other songs have been released on popular streaming services. For updates on Will Kimbrough’s projects, visit www.willkimbrough.com. The “Bubbles Up” episode of Kimbrough’s Super Service podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts.

Related:

In Mobile, a notion to honor Jimmy Buffett turns into something epic

Mobile’s Jimmy Buffett parade started with a whim — and a lot of help

Jimmy Buffett’s final studio album, featuring Paul McCartney and other stars, coming soon

Rock, roll, remember: Will & the Bushmen look back