{"id":18160,"date":"2022-05-27T09:21:43","date_gmt":"2022-05-27T14:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/?p=18160"},"modified":"2025-10-17T16:20:35","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T21:20:35","slug":"bruce-hornsby-collaborators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/bruce-hornsby-collaborators\/","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Hornsby on New Album and Having the Most Diverse Array of Collaborators Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 style=\"text-transform: none;\">From &#8216;The Way It Is&#8217; to the Grateful Dead and Bon Iver: Bruce Hornsby on His New Album, Wild Collaborations, and Lifelong Musical Curiosity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none;\" title=\"Libsyn Player\" src=\"\/\/html5-player.libsyn.com\/embed\/episode\/id\/23223722\/height\/90\/theme\/custom\/thumbnail\/yes\/direction\/forward\/render-playlist\/no\/custom-color\/87A93A\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"90\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bruce Hornsby, legendary pianist, singer, and songwriter, discusses his humble beginnings in a Grateful Dead cover band, his trials and triumphs in learning music in college, his almost-breakthrough with the Doobie Brothers, his mega breakthrough with \u201cThe Way It Is,\u201d and his eventual full-circle moment, playing some 100+ shows with the Grateful Dead.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But that was just the beginning for Bruce Hornsby. Since his debut, he has experimented with nearly every type of music, and to great effect: He has won Grammys for Pop and Bluegrass, and been nominated for Country. His \u201cyou may also like\u201d on streaming services is possibly the most diverse in all of music: Spotify recommends \u201cThis is Copland,\u201d \u201cInstrumental bluegrass,\u201d and \u201c2Pac Best Of.\u201d Bruce Hornsby\u2019s list of collaborators is just as diverse, enjoying long-term working relationships with Spike Lee and Ricky Skaggs.<\/p>\n<p>He has also enjoyed an unexpected recent career resurgence, courtesy of his collaborations with members of Bon Iver, in particular Justin Vernon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe had me come out and play his Eaux Claires Music and Arts Festival, and it just turned me out, because this festival was so beautiful,\u201d says Hornsby. \u201cIt just crushed me, I loved this thing so much! I had been brought into this world by Justin and found it so arresting and so inspiring, so these disparate connections turned into this recent music, where collaborations have run amok.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The new Bruce Hornsby album, <em>\u2018Flicted<\/em>, features some of these collaborations that have run amok, including Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, Blake Mills, Danielle Haim, Rob Moose, and more. In this extensive interview, he discusses everything mentioned in this write-up, and more!\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>If you&#8217;re short on time, you can read some of the interview highlights in the transcript below:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<p><strong>Do you remember the first time you sat at the keyboard and felt a connection?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby: <\/strong>Well, there are two answers to that. The first time I sat at the keyboard was at age seven or eight. Purportedly, I asked my mom if I could take piano lessons. I only did this for about a year, maybe a year plus, before I just didn\u2019t want to do it anymore. There was no real connection there. I took lessons in a funeral home, so you\u2019d get to walk the long walk up to the third floor where the piano did reside. I would walk by caskets and embalming fluid. At age seven or eight, that was not something you really wanted to keep doing. So that was my first moment with the piano. <br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it really struck me when I was 17. My older brother had gone away to prep school in New England. He was much less provincial than we were. We had the top 40 station and the soul station, and that\u2019s what we heard, and that was great. But he came home and turned us on to all these interesting, lesser-known bands than the mainstream. I know it sounds crazy to think that Elton John was once that. But in this case, he was! The first song that really smacked me in the face in the best way was \u201cAmoreena\u201d from <em>Tumbleweed Connection. <\/em><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>When you eventually sat at the keyboard again, did those lessons from 10 years back still remain or was it a fresh start?&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby: \ufeff<\/strong>I did have a little prior knowledge. My older brother Bobby Hornsby who turned me on to this music, he was the real musician of the family. I was more of a jock at the time. I had little bands, playing guitar: I was a guitar player then and I wrote my little songs in sixth grade when I was 12, 13 years old. But I wasn\u2019t serious about it\u2014I liked hoops more. But when I was in ninth grade he needed me to play keyboards on an old Farfisa organ in this soul band he was playing with down at Newport News, Virginia. So he taught me the basic chords, the basic triads. \u2026 I had a little bit of knowledge in that way and then just started picking it up by ear, and it always came fairly naturally and fairly easily to me.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Was that Bobby Hi-Test and the Octane Kids?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby: \ufeff<\/strong>That\u2019s right! It was my indoctrination into Grateful Dead music. Yeah, a few years later he was at UVA and he was in a total freak fraternity. They got thrown off campus for drug violations. They used to drop acid, paint their faces, and go play volleyball. They were lucky to hit one ball! <br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You first studied in Richmond, right? Were you as wild and experimental as your brother there?&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby: \ufeff<\/strong>No, not in that way. Even when I started playing 16 years later\u2014imagine, I was Brucey Hornsby, playing Fender Rhodes and singing lead on Grateful Dead songs with the Octane Kids, and then fast-forward 16 years later and I start winging it with no rehearsal at Madison Square Garden with the Grateful Dead.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The guys who hung out in those old hippie days in Charlottesville, Virginia, they all came to the Garden. I get chills thinking about that because that was just obviously an amazing \u201cpaint yourself into the mural\u201d moment, and it continued again for 20 months, about 100 shows. \u2026 But I told them, \u201cIf you guys dose me, I\u2019m out.\u201d Maybe I should have been dosed, maybe that would have been good for me. \u2026 But no, I never really embraced the Beta Theta Pi aesthetic. Because once I got into music, frankly I was so deeply involved. <br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Then after Richmond, you came to Berklee, but that wasn\u2019t where you ended up \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby: \ufeff<\/strong>Yeah, I was a bit of a school hopper as you&#8217;ve seen: three different colleges. Freshman year, Richmond, then I got into the accelerated program at Berklee, so I did freshman and sophomore year in two semesters at Ber-zerk-lee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then I took a semester off. Most of the people that you know of who left early to start their career, they were these sprung-from-Zeus figures like Keith Jarrett, for God&#8217;s sake. \u2026 playing with orchestras in their single digits, at age nine or something. I was the opposite. It was eight more years after age nine that I started this. So I was at Berklee, just trying to figure out what to do, and just trying to get the basics together. I lived real close to the New England Conservatory, close to Symphony Hall, so I decided that was my next move. Because I didn&#8217;t know anything! I was just flying by the seat of my pants and just going over here: \u201coh, this looks interesting,\u201d or \u201chow about this?\u201d Because I was from Williamsburg, Virginia\u2014not a musical Mecca\u2014so I was just trying to figure it out on my own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I made an audition tape to send to the New England Conservatory. I loved Chick Corea and I wrote him a letter, asking him about his music and he was so beautiful, he wrote me back\u2014two times! I still have the letters. I&#8217;d asked him for some sheet music, so he sent me some. I tried to play some of his music, I tried to play this tune called \u201cStraight Up and Down.\u201d I don&#8217;t think I can really even play it well now. So I&#8217;m trying to play it then, after having been playing for two or three years, and so the tape was terrible. I sent it to the New England Conservatory: I had my little brother playing bass\u2014he wasn&#8217;t serious about bass, he could do it okay\u2014and this drummer we knew. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, it was a complete shit sandwich audition tape. The guy called me up, Phil Wilson was his name, an old Berklee trombone teacher, who now was the head of the jazz department at the New England Conservatory. He called me and said  \u201cLook, I can tell there\u2019s something in there, so you\u2019ve got something, but you\u2019re not ready yet. You should try University of Miami.\u201d Again, I\u2019m like, \u201cokay, I\u2019m just taking the next suggestion and running with it.\u201d<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>When did you get to the point in your career where you realized you could do whatever you wanted with your music? I remember reading an interview with you after Don Henley\u2019s \u201cThe End of the Innocence\u201d came out and you said, \u201cthis is the end of my playing like this,\u201d or something to that effect, where you\u2019d made a conscious stylistic choice there.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby:<\/strong>Well, yes, I\u2019m restless. I\u2019m always looking to move to a new place. I also felt that frankly, it\u2019s a fickle world out there. You\u2019re damned if you do it, damned if you don\u2019t. Because if you have great success, do you choose the path of, \u201cokay, well, now I\u2019m pegged stylistically as this one thing and do I just continue to mine that?\u201d We know great artists who have done that. Basically the records have stylistically sounded the same from first record to twentieth record. There are a whole lot of their original true fans who are still with them because those fans don\u2019t want them to change. \u201cBe the person that I like,\u201d and I get that. But that\u2019s not me. I thought I had done this piano and LinnDrum machine and a Juno or OBX synth, bass, one-man show stuff, enough.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first few records of mine were with The Range, and then the next one is just [listed as] Bruce Hornsby and people would go, \u201cWell, I really miss the old band sound.\u201d Sometimes I would reply, \u201cWell, it\u2019s interesting you say that because what you\u2019re referring to as \u2018the old band sound\u2019 is me playing along with a LinnDrum machine and it\u2019s one-man show stuff.\u201d With maybe somebody\u2014David Mansfield, George Marinelli\u2014playing a guitar or mandolin over it.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The one that says \u201cBruce Hornsby\u201d (<em>Harbor Lights<\/em>) is actually three guys in a room, playing. Now, it\u2019s a blurry picture. You can\u2019t paint it all with one color because the last Range record was truly a band record too. That was the one where I thought, \u201cokay, enough of the LinnDrum. The band plays this music way better than the records.\u201d That\u2019s what we did. There is that one Range record where you really hear the band. But there\u2019s a really good German TV show called <em>Rockpalast<\/em>, and it\u2019s still available if you dig deep on the internet. It\u2019s a 1990 show, and Bruce Hornsby and the Range on <em>Rockpalast<\/em> played the gig with Living Colour, including my future dear friend Vernon Reid, who played on my last record, Non-Secure Connection, played on some stuff for Spike Lee and me. <br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Bruce Hornsby Live - 1990\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JHfLpvRIpM4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I know you\u2019ve been playing with a lot of younger artists recently, but have you always been up on new music?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby: \ufeff<\/strong>I\u2019ve always been interested. I\u2019ve always tried to stay current, but I wasn&#8217;t really as knowledgeable about the indie world as I became once I started being in that world. Because you&#8217;re in this world and they\u2019re talking about this guy and I\u2019m the clueless clown in the corner going, \u201cwell, who are they talking about?\u201d Then I\u2019d go check it out. But I think I got a little more interested a little earlier on in 2012-2013. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have this Google Alerts app, it sends me an email every day or so when you&#8217;re shouted out in something.  \u2026 So I started getting rained on with all of these Google Alerts about this band Bon Iver, and Justin Vernon shouting me out as an influence on his music, when he was coming up. He transcribed Pat Metheny\u2019s solo on \u201cHarbor Lights,\u201d for instance. He was a total music nerd in the most beautiful way. \u2026 So I started listening to this. I think the first thing I heard was \u201cHolocene,\u201d and I just went, \u201cwow, this is something really different and really moving and just great.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2026 So Justin called me to do a duet with him. He and his pals have always liked my version of the great Garcia\/Hunter song, \u201cBlack Muddy River\u201d on our record, <em>Here Come the Noisemakers<\/em>, our first live record from 2000. So we did that [for the 2016 compilation, Day of the Dead]. I went to Eau Claire and we became friends and it just kept evolving, growing, evolving into a collaboration on the record <em>Absolute Zero<\/em> [from 2016].<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What is it that gets you going with music and how after all these years are you still exploring new territory?&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bruce Hornsby: \ufeff<\/strong>I think anyone can see that I\u2019m deeply involved in what I do. I\u2019m just always searching for the new, searching for something that gives me the chills or something that just gets me going in a different way. It\u2019s not always about chills. I like funny songs too. So that\u2019s a different way to try to move someone. So what keeps me going? Everything I\u2019m saying, all the outside input I get from other musicians, the collaborative situation and the friendships that are made, that\u2019s as important as anything. It\u2019s been great fun and will continue to be, I think, and when it stops, fuck it, I\u2019ll stop.<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Hornsby discusses his humble start in a Grateful Dead cover band, his mega breakthrough with \u201cThe Way It Is,\u201d and his recent indie rock resurgence via his collaborations with members of Bon Iver. And yes, he also discusses how surreal it was to play 100+ shows with the real Grateful Dead!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":18161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9572,5,9566],"tags":[8899,8893,8896,6850,219,8888,8897,8057,8887,8885,8884,493,8886,605,8894,8891,8892,816,893,1118,8889,8895,1353,1356,8898,8890],"class_list":["post-18160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-piano-and-keyboard-articles","category-podcast","category-songwriting-articles","tag-2pac","tag-blake-mills","tag-bobcat-goldthwait","tag-bon-iver","tag-bonnie-raitt","tag-branford-marsalis","tag-bruce-hornsby","tag-chaka-khan","tag-clapton","tag-dylan","tag-eaux-claires","tag-elton-john","tag-ezra-koenig","tag-grateful-dead","tag-james-mercer","tag-jamila-woods","tag-justin-vernon","tag-leon-russell","tag-mavis-staples","tag-piano","tag-ricky-skaggs","tag-robin-williams","tag-stevie-nicks","tag-sting","tag-the-way-it-is","tag-vernon-reid"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.8 (Yoast SEO v25.8) - 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