Havana Daydreamin'[1] is the sixth studio album by American popular music singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett and his fourth regular major label album. It was produced by Don Gant and released on January 20, 1976, on ABC ABCD-914 and January 28, 1987, on ABC Dunhill's successor label MCA.
The album's name was originally to have been Kick It in Second Wind and was to have included the songs "Please Take Your Drunken 15 Year Old Girlfriend Home," "Train to Dixieland," and "Wonder Why You Ever Go Home" as well as a different version of "Kick It in Second Wind." Instead, these songs were replaced with "Woman Goin' Crazy on Caroline Street", "Havana Daydreamin'", and "Cliches."[2] "Wonder Why You Ever Go Home" was rewritten and rerecorded as "Wonder Why We Ever Go Home" for release on Buffett's next album Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.
Several rare versions of this album exist or are rumored to. These have altered song ordering and contain two songs that were deleted from the final release: "Please Take Your Drunken 15 Year Old Girlfriend Home" and "Train to Dixieland." A third song that is rumored to exist, "We've Been Taken to the Cleaners (and I Already Had my Shirts Done)," is likely apocryphal, as no known recording of it exists whereas the other two tracks are fairly easy to find in Buffett trading circles.[3]
Most of the songs on the album were written or co-written by Buffett, two with his future wife, Jane Slagsvol. Other songs include "Big Rig" written by Coral Reefer Greg "Fingers" Taylor and "This Hotel Room" by Steve Goodman (who also co-wrote "Woman Goin' Crazy on Caroline Street" with Buffett). The album also contains a remake of Jesse Winchester's "Defying Gravity," the first of several Winchester songs Buffett would record over his career. None of the songs on the album have been played regularly at Buffett's live concerts since the 1970s.
Havana Daydreamin' was Buffett's most successful album to date reaching No. 65 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 21 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. However, none of the three singles from the album charted.
William Ruhlmann of Allmusic wrote that "By the time of... Havana Daydreamin', Jimmy Buffett seemed to have established a pattern for what a collection of his songs would be". Ruhlman noted that while the album's style was still essentially the country music of Buffett's earlier work, this release exemplified his shift in audience from the country scene to the popular market, as well as his adoption of a "Gulf Coast ne'er-do-well" persona.[4] Peter Reilly of Stereo Review found the album appealing, saying "I confess that I find it hard to resist anyone who spends so little time trying to impress me". Reilly found the title track perhaps the best, calling it "an ambiguous trip into B. Traven (you remember him – The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Death Ship) territory".[6][7]Record World said that the song "is colored with a lilting south of the border sound that could be a north of the border success".[8] In 2012, Jeff Vrabel of The Florida Times-Union listed the track as one of Buffett's "lost treasures", describing it as "a humid, drifting tale of boats, wine and late-night stories, all wrapped in circumstances that seem darker and more criminal".[9]
^The lettering on the album cover and the CD shows Havaña Daydreamin' with an "ñ" in "Havana". This was noted in a critique in Stereo Review Volume 37 1976, which says "There is certainly pleasure aplenty ... in 'Havaña [sic] Daydreamin',' [Buffett's] latest disc for ABC/Dunhill", but which refers to the title track as "the title song, Havana Daydreamin'".
