Jimmy Buffett took his legendary island-music vibes to Sag Harbor’s WLNG radio station on Sunday, dropping by to premiere a new song, “My Gummy Just Kicked In,” on the local airwaves.
Days afterward, the crew at WLNG was still tickled over the visit by Mr. Buffett, who used to live across the street from the radio station on Redwood Road and now lives on North Haven. A video clip of his interview on the show “Lunch on the Deck” with Bill Evans and Jessica Ambrose was steadily racking up views on Facebook.
“We’re really honored,” Mr. Evans, who co-owns the radio station with his wife, Sandra Foschi, said on Tuesday. “He could have done this world debut with anybody — Odyssey, iHeart, any of these huge radio groups — but he chose us.”
The song itself isn’t featured in the Facebook video because its official release was still two weeks away and “there may be some remastering of the original,” according to WLNG.
But Mr. Evans said he thinks the new song is great. “It has a wonderful hook to it and it’s timely,” he said. “He hears a phrase and he turns it into a song. It’s very Jimmy Buffett. The music is great, Paul McCartney plays bass on the song, it’s got steel drum.”
In his radio interview, Mr. Buffett said he was thrilled to see an osprey nest in the WLNG tower — “They keep building them; I’ve got two,” Mr. Evans said, before Mr. Buffett continued, “I love those birds” — and hummed a couple notes of some unspecified tune before they went live on the air.
“It is a special moment. . . . We say this all the time, when you’re walking around Sag Harbor you have no idea what’s going to happen, who you’re going to run into. Yeah, so the funniest thing happened this morning,” Ms. Ambrose said.
“We ran into a local,” Mr. Evans said.
“I was lost. I thought I was in Amagansett,” Mr. Buffett joked.
It wasn’t his first time visiting WLNG for an interview. A few years ago, Mr. Evans said, Mr. Buffett joined Lee Skolnick on a Sunday night show called “The Originals.”
Mr. Evans said Mr. Buffett has expressed interest in playing a few tunes live on the dock behind the radio station building sometime in August.
“We’re honored and we want to say thank you to Jimmy,” he said. “We’re proud of our people at WLNG who work there and put on a great product every day. He listens and loves our radio station, and that’s a great compliment.”
