Bruce Hornsby Is Still Seeing What He Can Get Away With

Bruce Hornsby Is Still Seeing What He Can Get Away With Since The Way It Is, the visionary songwriter has made his mark on so many genres. His latest, Deep Sea Vents, dives once again into something new.

By

John Mirisola

March 6, 2024

Bruce Hornsby '74

Image by Tristan Williams

Press play on Deep Sea Vents, the new collaboration from Bruce Hornsby '74 and the sought-after contemporary classical ensemble yMusic, and one thing quickly becomes obvious: This is not Hornsby resting on his past successes-many and multifaceted as they may be.

Over the past forty years Hornsby has amassed one of the most varied catalogs in modern music. Its not boring anyway, he joked in a phone interview last month.

The Music that Made Berklee

See how The Way It Is and so many other songs have shaped Berklees legacy.

To summarize, incompletely: Theres his deep well of thoughtful, slightly askew pop-rock songs, beginning with 1986s The Way It Is, whose title track helped launch Hornsbys career and then enjoyed a bank-shot second life as an iconic 2Pac sample. There are his contributions to the jam music world (most famously as a live keyboardist for the Grateful Dead for a number of years in the '80s and '90s); his bluegrass group with Ricky Skaggs; his jazz trio with Jack DeJohnette and Christian McBride; and his many screen scoring projects with director Spike Lee. Then theres his more recent emergence as a key collaborator in the modern indie music world, working with Bon Ivers Justin Vernon and Vampire Weekends Ezra Koenig, among others, and sharing the stage with indie-jam crossover act Goose. Also, should we mention he played the memorable piano part on Bonnie Raitts classic hit, I Cant Make You Love Me?

Watch Bruce Hornsby join Goose for their live cover of The Way It Is:

Yet the wry, experimental chamber pop of Deep Sea Vents, released under the collective moniker BrhyM, sounds like nothing else in that discography, and proves he still has more sonic territory to explore, even if he needs to survey the ocean floor to find it.

The Wild Whaling LifeIm just always looking for the new, and looking for inspiration in new places, and also looking not to repeat myself, said Hornsby, describing himself as a wandering minstrel, stylistically.

Something just presents itself emphatically, saying to me, This is where you should go. This will not be denied. Do this, dont f*** around. Deal with this right now. And so I try to listen to that loud voice.

The inspirational touch-points across these ten tracks are vast. He draws on a New York Times science story (Deep Sea Vents), web research on the platypus (Platypus Wow), a decades-old family joke (the song Barber Booty is a nod to how his sons used to pronounce their family barber shop, Barber/Beauty, as young children), and a couple Stephen Crane poems recalled from an eighth-grade English class (Deep Blue), among other sources.

Listen to The Wild Whaling Life by BrhyM

Hornsbys voracious curiosity has always been an engine for his creativity, and literature has played a particularly significant role in his compositions. My reading life has, for the last many years, completely influenced my songwriting life, he said. Prior to Deep Sea Vents, there have been songs referencing novels by Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, for instance. And then theres The Wild Whaling Life on this new album, which came together as Hornsby was reading Moby-Dick during the pandemic.

[yMusic] sent me this track around late November of 2020, he recalled. And their track just sounded like the book. A lot of the sounds they were making sounded sea-like. Seagulls and bushy ocean birds making sounds. And so it just led me to this place where I thought, Okay, let me go back through this book that Ive been reading. So Hornsby flipped through marked-up passages and margin notes, eventually shaping those ideas into a celebration of a life that sounds a lot like the one hes been lucky enough to lead-a wanderer, feeling pride in pushing forward, always in search of the big one. This is what I chose for my lifes work, he sings, Its the wild whaling life for me.

I Am the PlatypusWhile Hornsby has never shied away from weighty subjects in his songwriting (The Way It Is alone tackles issues of class, race, and social progress), hes also one of the only songwriters of his stature to follow that loud voice of inspiration into songs of humor and frivolity. For evidence, look no further than the skronky, honking Platypus Wow.

The song began as a yMusic demo with the word duck in its working title, and by a series of associative leaps from the horns quacking and the titles billing, Hornsby found his way into a deep dive on the egg-laying mammal and its ilk.

I just started doing a little research about the platypus, and platypuses related cousins, which led me to some old cartoon characters that I knew from my sons early days-Crash Bandicoot and Knuckles the Echidna, Hornsby said. And so I just went from there, learning about this whole area and writing about it, with a light strain on a tone level, because the music had that.

The result is a track that manages to sashay along the boundary between absurdity and fascination, and that BrhyM successfully carry off on the strength and strangeness of their performance.

Part human, part bird / Part beaver, reptile nerd / Im weird just like you / Lets exult in greens and blues, he sings with a swagger, and its easy to imagine Hornsby identifying with the platypus here.

Because of the way Im singing, I call it Sugarfoot of [funk band] the Ohio Players meets [20th century avant-garde composer] Pierre Boulez, said Hornsby-a string of words only this artist could credibly utter. Its completely an odd match. Im sure Pierre Boulez has never heard of Sugarfoot and vice-versa. I feel pretty confident about that.

A Zappo ProductionWhi

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