Mac McAnally on Playing with the Reefers, the Doobies, Amy Grant, and the Country Bear Jamboree – Garden & Gun

You’d never know it from his perennially laid-back demeanor, but Mac McAnally is a busy man. The sixty-eight-year-old Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, ten-time CMA Musician of the Year, and decades-long righthand man and dear friend of Jimmy Buffett is in the middle of a summer tour with the Coral Reefer Band, opening for the Doobie Brothers. He’s performing ongoing “Margaritas and Memories” shows with Scotty Emerick. He also just finished up something really, really cool with, of all things, the Country Bear Jamboree. With seventeen solo albums under his belt and writing credits on six number-one country songs (including “Down the Road” with Kenny Chesney and “Old Flame” with Alabama), he will accept the Academy of Country Music’s Poet’s Award on Thursday, August 20. Thinking it might be a good time for a catch-up call, we reached him in Boston, where he was about to play a show with the Reefers at one of Jimmy Buffett’s favorite venues, the Xfinity Center, better known to Parrot Heads as Great Woods. 

You’re currently on the road with the Coral Reefers, playing with the Doobie Brothers. There’s an Academy of Country Music Poet’s Award coming up for you this week. Then some pretty interesting stuff has been happening elsewhere, too. 

I’m in danger of losing my license as a lazy Mississippian. It doesn’t seem so much like work when you’re doing your favorite thing in the world. Whether it’s singing or writing or producing (what I call the produce section) or playing guitar or being a Coral Reefer—all of those things are an extension of music for me, which, as far as I can tell, is the only thing I don’t suck at. And I would do it every day if nobody was paying me. So, at the moment, the light bills are paid, and I get to play music, too. I’m the last guy you’re going to see complain.

How did the Doobies/Reefers tour come about? 

Well, the Reefers, you know, are a second family, and we relish all opportunities to congregate. In the absence of Jimmy, it’s been kind of a question mark how many opportunities there would be. But Jimmy shared some management ties—he and the Doobies had been friends forever. Karim Karmi, who worked with Jimmy via Irving Azoff’s office and also works with the Doobies, just woke up one day and said, “My goodness, you guys should play together.” And whether it’s just a weed joke—the Doobie/Reefer tour—or whether it’s, well…I suggested we should have been sponsored by Doritos.

How do the Doobie fans and the Parrot Heads get along? 

We have different fan bases, but there is a cross section of everybody’s fan base with Jimmy’s, and of everybody’s fan base with the Doobies, because they have so many hits across such a piece of time. Jimmy spread so much joy over five decades. His shows have united millions of people. The Doobies’ whole organization is just an awesome group of people, very similarly built to what Jimmy did. We have twenty shows on the books, and I think this will be the eighth of those that we’re going to play tonight in Boston at the old Great Woods—one of our favorite places. The fans at Great Woods have been exemplary in their commitment to being Parrot Heads. They’ve always built little cities out in the parking lot, and that’s been something new for the Doobies, so they’re enjoying seeing that. And although you can sort of tell the fan bases apart in the audience—it’s Hawaiian shirts standing up and black T-shirts sitting down—they’re all serious music fans. 

Photo: courtesy Mac McAnally

McAnally.

It’s got to be interesting with y’all not being the headline act.  

The Reefers’ fans are used to seeing a two-hour-plus show, and clearly we should be the opening act in this scenario because we are missing the main ingredient of Jimmy Buffett. We leave his microphone empty in the middle of the stage. I want people to know we’re not trying to replace the guy. We’re just trying to continue to spread the joy that he spread so well for so long. So we’re not a known entity in that sense, but we’ve got really good singers in the band, and we have all of the love that he had for the music and for the people who enjoy listening to it. It’s also a blessing for us to get to share in the crowd of, really, one of the best rock and roll bands America has ever produced in the Doobie Brothers. Since we’ve been playing these shows, we’ve gotten quite a few contacts about playing some headline shows next summer as the Coral Reefers. So, Karim had the idea and it was a good idea for everybody that he had it. 

The ACM Poet’s Award. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

I’ve been, in my own personal opinion, over-honored over the years. But I always heard music in my head, and the songwriting part just blurted out at some point. I didn’t know what I was doing, you know? It just fell out of my mouth. The first several songs I ever wrote, I just sang them complete—like somebody else had written them. 

Early on, you didn’t even write down the songs you came up with, right? 

I didn’t. My original logic, which I would caution anybody else in the world against, was that if I couldn’t remember it, I didn’t have the right to inflict it on anybody else. I realized maybe a decade into it how horrible it was—when I had five or six albums worth of material to remember, forty or fifty songs in progress I was trying to remember, and at the same time I was trying to remember Jimmy Buffett’s music to play, and Kenny Chesney’s music to play, and the stuff I was working on in studios to play. It crowded out the names of my aunts and things I should have been remembering. At a certain point, I got a word processor and I would cut and paste. I had one of the most inefficient paths toward getting a Poet’s Award of anybody that will ever get that award, I’m sure. 

But that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. The fact is that what initially for me was just purging some feelings—whatever was welling up inside of me fell out through my hands and my mouth—I didn’t call that songwriting for a long time, until I had people coming up and telling me, This meant something to me. I never really considered that songwriting because it seemed like it ought to be labor. And then later on, it was labor, and now it is labor. You know, the songs that pop out of you in your teens and twenties come out a little slower in your thirties and forties. And I’m in my sixties now, so I have to dig deeper to find what’s left and to not plagiarize what happened before. 

You hail from Belmont, Mississippi, and still call that state home.

I do, and we still have the homeplace there. My baby sister lives in the house that my dad built. But my studio is in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Even though I’ve been in Nashville working since ’93 and I love Nashville, the creative home for me is Muscle Shoals. The early stuff Jimmy and I wrote and recorded was there. And the fact that I have that allows me to feel at home everywhere in the world. 

You’ve been working with Amy Grant and her husband, Vince Gill, recently, too.

I’m proud of a forthcoming project that I produced for Amy Grant—one of my favorite people in the world—and it’s just fabulous music. I don’t even deserve to get to be associated with it, she’s so good. The album is called The Me That Remains. She’s had an eventful decade health-wise. She had open-heart surgery, she had a biking accident, had brain surgeries. My standard line on Amy is that the most devout atheist in the world knows she’s an angel. And she’s married to one of the greatest human beings that walks the earth. Vince Gill’s one of my good friends from way back. And there’s some big Jimmy news I can’t talk about yet; that’ll be by the end of this month—I’m tickled to still get to represent his musical legacy. And we’ve got some stuff in the can that Jimmy recorded and for whatever reason he said, “Well, we don’t need that many songs on this record.” We’re going to try to assemble that into a project worthy of what he laid out. So that’s happening in the coming year. 

In the meantime, I just got to play at the Sphere with Kenny Chesney. He did his first run of shows there. That place is amazing—there’s nothing else like it in the world. I think it has 167,000 speakers in the sound system, and the whole deal is basically a video wall, and I got to get up and sing a couple of my silly songs with Kenny. And we sang “Come Monday” to honor Jimmy there. The whole place sang with us. 

And you just helped reinterpret some Disney music for Country Bear Jamboree for Disney—Frozen and The Little Mermaid? 

It’s such a wild thing. I took my kids there, you know? It had nostalgia for me. I knew the music. I joked with the Disney team that the very voice that probably ran me out of the pop music world made me uniquely qualified to be a cartoon bear. And I just had the biggest time arranging these classic Disney movie songs into sort of Appalachian acoustic music form. I get to play a bunch of parts and sing a bunch of parts, and I actually am one of the bears. I’m Shaker in the show—a guitar player.

And you sang Bear Necessities from Jungle Book? 

And I’ve done it as a request in my solo shows a couple of times here lately. At almost every solo show, I end up signing a Country Bear Jamboree poster. 

Are you performing during the ACM Honors show?

No. My main goal is to not get that award revoked during my acceptance speech. I don’t want somebody to come running out and take it away from me because I’m an idiot. Honestly I would much rather be performing, because talking without a guitar in my hand is terrifying. 

The ACM Honors Awards will be held August 20 at the Pinnacle in Nashville and broadcast at an as-yet-unannounced date on Fox.