Escape to Margaritaville is my platonic ideal of a single-artist, non-biographical jukebox musical. 

Oh, you really thought Write All Nite would let Jimmy Buffett die without pouring writing one out for the champ?

His jukeboxer solved one of the genre’s evergreen problems: how to hide the fact that the songs weren’t written to tell the show’s stories.

Escape to Margaritaville understood that, over the course of a varied career, deep writers — yes, Mr. Head of Parrots was a deep AND varied writer — toggle between at least a handful of musical registers, themes, perspectives, etc. The Broadway production (the only iteration I can vouch for personally) managed to connect these strands from song to song — and even from verse to verse — across his oeuvre, and used them as a guide to craft its characters, each of whom is almost defined by the particulars of that strand.

And a musical’s primary means of communicating character is…?

What each of them sings, obviously.