George Strait sings ode to Miami on his new song. How it compares to Swift’s ‘Florida!!!’
In April, Taylor Swift dropped her new album and Florida’s tourism board almost certainly salivated over the eighth track, “Florida!!!” in which Swift portrays the Sunshine State as the ultimate escapist region. “Florida is one hell of a drug/Can I use you up?” she sings and slips in a mysterious reference to Destin, a city in Northwest Florida’s Panhandle, known for its beaches and golf courses. Swifties are still trying to unravel its meaning.
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One month later, nearly to the day, on Friday, country legend George Strait released his new single, “MIA Down in MIA,” a similar ode to escapism in Florida and a preview of his 31st studio album, “Cowboys and Dreamers,” that is due Sept. 6.
It’s not an answer song to Swift’s punchy number, but South Florida natives are almost assuredly going to bask in Strait’s sunnier-side-up anthem.
Strait’s Key West connection
The Texan star, who has recorded all but one of his last seven albums, dating back to 2006, at his late pal Jimmy Buffett’s Key West studio, Shrimpboat Sound, is unabashedly gushing about Miami in the Gulf and Western music style of Buffett’s sun-kissed anthems like “Margaritaville.”
Buffett, who had sung a live duet of “Margaritaville” with Strait and fellow country star Alan Jackson from Texas Stadium in 2004, told the Miami Herald last April that he completed “Margaritaville” on the side of the road on the Seven Mile Bridge, west of Marathon, while staring out at Pigeon Key, as he waited for a fender-bender to clear in 1976.
KNOW MORE: How Jimmy Buffett found his vibe in the Keys, and why Florida will miss his presence
Strait captures the same Keys-like vibe on the new single and lyric video.
“I’m going MIA/Down in MIA/Take that A1A to where the palm trees sway,” Strait sings in the jaunty tunes’ opening lines that were composed by songwriters Adam Craig and Dean Dillon.
Contrasting Swift, Strait Florida songs
Swift, however, got all “Bloodline” covert in rhapsodizing about one shady side of Florida ala her stanza: “I need to forget, so take me to Florida/I’ve got some regrets, I’ll bury them in Florida/Tell me I’m despicable, say it’s unforgivable/At least the dolls are beautiful, [expletive] me up, Florida.”
The 34-year-old superstar also name drops Strait’s birth state in her exclamatory “Florida!!!” tune: “So you pack your life away/Just to wait out the s---storm back in Texas.”
Nothing so backwoods noirish going on in the country gentleman’s ditty with its breezy references to beach chairs, a “cooler full of totties,” Ray Ban sunglasses and “water-colored painted bodies” sprawled on white sand.
Strait, 72, who has made a living since 1981 singing traditionalist country fare in straightforward fashion, zeroes in on an aspect of Miami in “MIA Down in MIA” that the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau has been touting for decades:
My little hideaway/Hello land of Corona/White beaches, Florida fauna/
I’m heading out today/I’m going MIA down in MIA/
I’m sick and tired of staring at these four gray walls staring back at me/
To tell the truth I’m about to come unglued/Trying to find a piece of happy/
So, I threw a dart at a map/Told the blues, take that I’m leaving/
I found a place in Fla with one of every single thing I’ve been needin’/
I’m going MIA/Down in MIA.
Maybe Strait can cheer up the moody Swift and bring her down south from Destin.
