A Conversation with Bruce Hornsby – HuffPost 8.29.14
Mike Ragogna: How are you doing, Bruce?
Bruce Hornsby: I’m doing fine, but “…you don’t come to Vegas and talk to a man like Moe Greene like that!”
MR: [laughs] “Fredo, you’re my brother and I love you. But don’t ever take sides against the family again.” Bruuuce! Here you are playing solo in some elegant halls in 2012 and 2013, and I’m imagining some people in the audience might have been expecting a different approach considering your pop history and previous live tours.
BH: I’ve been doing these solo concerts for a long time and I’ve been doing solo concerts since ’95 when I rededicated myself to studying the piano, when I turned forty. I’ve been doing a lot of them for the last several years, but a lot of people who come to these concerts know what to expect. Now, a lot who come do not know what to expect, but a good number have followed me through this business, this evolution. It’s not like they came and were shocked by all this. Mind you, of course, a good number of people are coming without a clue about this. You’re basically asking me, “What happens at a solo concert in the last few years,” right?
MR: I’m really just asking about this particular series of concerts. I’ve got all your albums, I know much about your solo shows, but to me, these shows come off as being more sophisticated than anything you previously recorded. And its intimacy definitely reminds me of The Köln Concert.
BH: Well, it’s certainly a different level of, I don’t know, expertise, maybe. This is very demanding, but I’ve been working towards this for a very long time. I’ve been trying to achieve a certain level of two-handed independence for about eighteen or nineteen years. It’s funny, you brought up The Köln Concert. For the masses, that’s sort of the archetypical solo piano record, but it wasn’t the one for me. I’m a total Keith Jarrett devotee. If you could say there was one musician who influenced me the most through the years, it’s him. Although this record, my first attempt at a solo record, I don’t think it sounds anything like him. And that’s good! There are lots of Keith Jarrett imitators out there and I have been one over the years, but not now. That was his third solo record, his first solo record was Facing You, a studio solo record on ECM back when ECM was a total import label, they didn’t have an American deal. You’d have to go to a big Northeastern city and find the imports section of the best record store to get this record. I got it when I was eighteen. Then his next record was Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne a two- or three-record set on ECM. Then The Köln Concert, I believe, was the third. That was the one that was really “popular.” I think it still is the largest-selling solo piano record in history. Well over a million records, maybe two million records now. I think the reason for its popularity, I would say that record spawned a major amount of lesser-than imitators, which started “new age” music. That’s my theory, and I know a lot of other friends of mine who say the same about it. That Köln concert record is a fantastic record. I have a transcription book–someone transcribed the whole thing. From what I understand, he played that concert on a pretty bad piano. I think he felt that the only thing that sounded good for the most part on that piano was very simple, diatonic music; white note music. This is my understanding, I could be wrong about it, but my understanding is that because of that it’s a very simple record harmonically, the chords he plays are very accessible. It’s a beautiful record and of course the guy’s a transcendent musician, one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever heard. But that, to me, is why that one was so popular, because it was very simple compared to Facing You or Bremen/Lausanne or the subsequent records.
I’m longwinded about that because then I’ll fast-forward up to this record which is really not that, it’s not at all like The Köln Concert because this is dealing much more with chromatic language and dissonance and atonality, frankly, and finding a place for that in the popular song context, because let’s face it, I’m a songwriter as well as a pianist and singer. It all starts with the songs for me, but I’ve been interested in modern classical music with its very challenging, adventurous, harmonic language for a really long time and much more intensely for the last ten years and it’s really influenced a lot of my songwriting, so you’ll find a lot of those songs on here. “Where No One’s Mad,” “Paper Boy,” “Might As Well Be Me,” the song I wrote with Robert Hunter, they all have this language, but at their roots, they’re all pop songs, or rootsy, bluesy songs. So this record is a culmination of a lot of my explorations and experimentations in this area where I’ve been trying to develop two-handed independence, deal with roots forms like boogie-woogie, blues and New Orleans piano and hymn-influenced music, and finding a place for the modern, chromatic, dissonant, atonal language in and around these more basic forms. So there you go. There’s a lot to talk about here, but that’s it in a really big nutshell.
MR: Well, I feel that the musical “amalgam” presented on this album and in those 2012, 2013 concerts could be influential. I don’t think a record’s ever been done like this before.
BH: That’s nice. Yeah, I’ve always tried to stay inspired and move to new places, and this juxtaposition of roots-y piano styles with this modern harmonic language is something that I’ve been interested in for several years and this is the first public release of the music that I’ve been trying to put together. If it’s going to be influential, it’s going to be influential on people who are willing to work very hard to deal with this area. This is very difficult music to play and then to conceptualize and find a way to take this information and put it into popular song context. A perfect example–and this is why I’ve sequenced these things this way–is the combination of two pieces; the Elliott Carter “Caténaires” and then my song “Where No One’s Mad,” which is a sort of bi-tonal pop song. I’ve sequenced it like that, and in concert I play it like this, I’ll often play the Carter piece and then “Where No One’s Mad” because a lot of the information in “Where No One’s Mad” is coming from little bits and pieces of the Carter piece. There was this one little couple-bar section in the Carter piece where I thought, “Okay, this sequence of notes here could work as an altered C7th chord, and if I play that and play a left hand bass part underneath it and then sing this one-note melody then that could be something really unique and special that I’ve never heard before.” That’s what I did, and that’s the part of “Where No One’s Mad,” “Like wearing a stupid helmet on a big-wheeled trike and putting training wheels on my hand-me-down bike.” That section, which is called the B section of “Where No One’s Mad,” comes from that Carter piece.
Another example is I’m playing an excerpt from the Schoenberg Piano Concerto, it’s five pages of a piece that I love, a piece he wrote in the mid to late forties when he lived in Los Angeles, teaching at UCLA I think. That’s a twelve-tone piece, and there’s a twelve-tone row in that piece, it’s mostly in the left hand. I took this row–or most of it–from this one little couple of bars of the Schoenberg piece and that was the melodic information that I used to write the song with Hunter, “Might As Well Be Me,” which comes after the Schoenberg. So once again this is kind of a music lesson, I’m showing all three people who care where this information in my new songs comes from. Frankly I love the influence on my music because I would never write this way if I hadn’t gotten interested in all this music. I’ve been interested in this music since I was in college. When I was at Berklee in Boston, you could check out records like you checked out books at the Boston Public Library. I would go into their little record area and I’d get all the modern music. I got turned on to Charles Ives at that point. It really started way back when, but it really moved into high gear with Columbia Records in 2003.
This is kind of a funny story: I was with Columbia in 2003 and one of the best aspects of signing with Columbia is if you’re an artist on Columbia you can raid their catalog and it’s all free. They have the most amazing catalog of classical records and jazz records–and obviously rock and pop records, too. So I ordered a hundred and seventy six or a hundred and seventy seven CDs. They were probably kind of bummed with me because I was really taking too much advantage of this nice aspect of being an artist on Columbia. I got most of the Glenn Gould catalog. Gould was a real modern music proponent. I got all his records, the Schoenburg Suite For Piano, I play a piece from that, “The Gavotte” on this in front of “Paperboy” because that influenced the song. I got him playing all this modern music, Webern, Schoenberg, and others, I got Pierre Boulez conducting the complete Webern, on and on. I could just keep going, but it’s boring, so I’ll stop. But it really sent me headlong even more so into this modern music area, and this is the creative result of all my forays into that atmosphere.
MR: In your opinion, is there anybody else exploring classical music in the way you are? Anyone you admire who’s taking it to a similar level?
BH: In the popular or rock world, I really don’t know anybody else. Certainly in the jazz world, there are people who are influenced by this, but I’m really not so up on the jazz world. I just got off the road with Pat Metheny, we had the best time playing together for the last month, but I would be guessing if I named names. I think there’s a great musician out there named Vijay Iyer, he’s very forward thinking. Brad Mehldau is another one who’s of course an incredible musician. He may be doing something along this line but I’m not really up on it. In my world, which I guess is the singer songwriter world hell no. Maybe there are people, but I guess I’m unaware because I feel that they’re probably just not interested and I understand that.
MR: On the other hand, it’s sort of hard to go back to that title of “singer-songwriter” after your musical evolution. I don’t think there’s anybody else out there who are exploring and understanding the roots and connections that you’re making through unifying the genres.
BH: It’s a lonely road that I walk. [laughs]
MR: Yeah, I’ll stop fawning now.
BH: But I appreciate it, and you may be right. I’m aware that I live in my own cloistered world.
MR: My feeling is that you’re taking another jump in your musical evolution, one that embraces your amalgams in an easier way to hear or understand than straight on classical, etc.
BH: I think it’s really easy to write formulaic pop music, and it’s hard to be great at anything. That said, it’s not difficult at all to write very simple music that most people when they hear it go, “Oh yeah, like that. It sounds very familiar.” It’s also, to me, very easy to be completely out and obtuse and obscure and inaccessible. I think it’s very difficult to find that middle ground where you’re pushing the envelope but it still reaches people. I just did an interview a while ago where someone said, “At your concerts I’m sure people are just totally not expecting this. The reactions must be strange.” I think it was a good question, and I was happy to get it because I could respond very truthfully that in my case most of the “tour de Force” pieces, like “Preacher In The Ring” where I put the Webern piece and the Carter piece in as excerpts in that boogie-woogie tune about the snake handlers of Appalachia, or “Life In The Psychotropics” or “Where No One’s Mad” or “Might As Well Be Me,” any of these that are the more adventurous pieces. I know that in almost all cases, these are pieces that the crowd really responds to. I feel like I’m connecting with them with this esoteric material. I feel like I’m finding a way to do it. Now, obviously, it’s not for everybody, there are a whole lot of people there who would like it if I really didn’t do this.
MR: [laughs] But that music had its day, you get to grow.
BH: I play four or five every night. And two of them are on this! They’re not the versions that they know, but “Valley Road” is a blues shuffle and “Mandolin Rain” is a minor-key modal version, the version I play with the Scaggs/Hornsby group. I will play “The Way It Is,” I will play “The End Of The Innocence,” the song I wrote with Henley, and I will play “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” because I didn’t write that song but I played on the record for Bonnie Raitt and I’m proud to have been a part of that. That’s a record that I consider to be the iconic hit song for her. It’s a fantastic song. Mike Reid, a former defensive tackle with the Cincinnati Bengals, wrote it. I dutifully play those songs 1) because I’m really proud of them, and 2) I feel like since I’m demanding a lot of the audience I’m going to give them this, too. I’m hoping that it’s a combination that makes everybody come away saying, “Well, this is not what we expected, but at least we got the songs that we wanted to hear.”
MR: And you’ve accumulated years and years of entertaining, so you understand connecting to the audience. During this particular run of concerts did you feel a particular difference in the connection with the audience?
BH: I’m always gratified by the response to these more challenging pieces, the newer work. Mind you, there are definitely some nights where I’ll play “Paperboy” or “Might As Well Be Me” and the response is rather tepid, but more often than not there’s a real boisterous, enthusiastic reception. That gives me hope that this is something that is finding that difficult middle ground where you’re moving to an adventurous place, a challenging place, but you’re also doing it in a way that can connect.
MR: What has changed or evolved in the way that you’re approaching these live performances?
BH: One thing that I’ve done–and some people might not like this–to achieve a level of proficiency playing this very demanding music, I have had to focus on a certain twenty-five or thirty songs and have these fairly tight arrangements of them so I can play them well. Some people who wish I would just play a different set every night and play all the requests that people throw up on stage may not like this. Look, I understand that. If they’re coming on a sort of Grateful Dead level to hear three nights in a row and they want to hear no repetition in the sets I understand that. But at the same time, in the early 2000s, I would listen to concerts I would do where I was really doing that, playing eighty or ninety different songs throughout the course of a tour–and we still do that with our Noisemakers band. We still have a large group of songs that we choose from, and I have a large group of songs that I can choose from here–but I’ve been choosing to play this more modern music because I feel like it’s the most unique, interesting thing I’m doing. The songs that are on this record, certainly CD one in particular are the songs that we’re talking about.
MR: In some respects, it seems that the earlier material is more locked into everybody’s minds, so maybe it makes it a littler harder to break the paradigms that built them?
BH: No, that’s not really true, I reinvent those songs in the same way. “The Way It Is” gets a good eight-minute solo treatment, and I’ll play “Bach Goldberg Variations” in the middle of it. It’s not at all like the record.
MR: Another familiar hit, “Valley Road,” also appears on the new one.
BH: “Valley Road” is the same thing. “Valley Road” is always reinvented, it’s just yet another version. The version here, the shuffle, bluesy version is most akin to the version I played with The Grateful Dead when I joined them for those twenty months from ’90 to ’92. We played a shuffle version, which was the first time that version was played. I kind of refer to it as “The Dead Version,” and this is that Dead version with a very different kind of soloing on it, that angular style. I’m not just playing the classic piano blues licks. I like those licks, but I’m a little tired of them, so I’m looking for a different thing to play while I’m playing my left hand shuffle groove. So that’s “Valley Road.”
I don’t really reinvent “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Ballads somehow don’t lend themselves as much to new interpretations or exploration and experimentation, but everything else I do, whether it’s “The Way It Is” or “Mandolin Rain,” they tend to get fooled around with quite a bit. But I would listen to these recordings from when I was playing a whole bunch of different songs and taking all the requests and I felt like, “Well I’m playing all of these songs but I’m not really doing them very well.” I didn’t like the performances. When I listened to myself do something I didn’t do very often I thought it was not very good. So I felt that I needed to tighten it up and just perform a smaller number of songs better, more adeptly. That’s what’s changed over the years.
And also, like I said before, the technical demands of this music–whether it’s Carter’s “Caténaires” or “The Goldberg Variations” or the Ligeti Étude down towards the end of the record, the demands just on a memorization level and on a technique level are so demanding that I spend most of my time really just trying to do those really well. I guess in a nutshell I want to do a few things really well rather than a whole lot of things not that well.
MR: You’re on Vanguard now. To me, that’s the home for many energetic young singer-songwriters. As you do your meet and greets with the younger men and ladies, it’ll be interesting to see how you might spread yourself around the Vanguard roster.
BH: I don’t really know if we’ll intersect that much. I don’t really imagine coming into a lot of contact with the rest of the Vanguard roster. If it happens, I’m fine with that, I have no problem meeting with these young lions. This is a serious road that I’m going down here, but my next record will finally be our dulcimer record with the Noisemakers and it’s completely the opposite of chromatic and dissonant. The dulcimer only has the white notes, not the black ones, so to speak. We’re actually starting to record this in a couple of weeks, and it will be the opposite aesthetic of this record. I’ve got a couple of different areas that I’m dealing with here. I really love the songs that I’m writing with my friend Chip DeMatteo, and we’ve written several that we’re recording on this dulcimer record and that’s an area that I’m equally excited about. People have been asking me to put out a solo concerts record for years because they would come to my solo concerts and they would go, “Wow, we just love this, but there’s nothing we can buy that sounds anything like this.” Finally, it’s here. Here it is, for anybody that’s interested. All three of you.
MR: [laughs] What advice do you have for new artists?
BH: This comes from years of dutifully being nice and actually listening to aspiring musicians’ files and CDs and tapes that they’ve sent me, almost every time I say the same thing: I feel that stylistically they’re kind of generic, they’re not unique. I’m always prodding and encouraging people to take it a little out and find your own sound. Don’t take it as a compliment if somebody tells you, “Hey you sound like,” fill in the blank. You really want somebody to say to you, “You sound like nothing I’ve ever heard.” It’s really difficult to get to that point stylistically in your music where you sound totally unique, but that should be the aim, I think, to carve out your own niche in the scene.
MR: I’ve never heard it put like that before, nice.
BH: That’s just what I think. Your compliments regarding this solo concerts record fit right into this. For better or for worse you feel that this is a record that you’ve never heard before, stylistically. You, Mike, said that this is a record that nobody’s ever done. That’s the aim! My goal is to find things that inspire me and have them influence my music and take me to new places. If someone says that to me about this record that’s a high compliment and exactly what I would love to hear, to be perfectly honest with you. This is my version of this, but when I talk to someone who’s an aspiring artist I guess I would probably say, “You may not like this solo concerts record that I’ve done, but at the very least you would probably not say, “it sounds like so-and-so.” That’s what you want. That’s what I want. That’s what anyone should want.
MR: Beautiful. And that ends up becoming influential just from it being so unique, and you do it in a melodically dissonant way that makes it inviting. It’s very tricky when it comes to Bruce Hornsby music, let me tell you.
BH: That’s the fun of it though, right? I’m almost sixty years old and I’m tired of hearing the same old s**t. I’ve just had it. I couldn’t care less. That’s why it’s hard to listen to the radio; there’s nothing much in it for me. Look, they don’t want me to like it, I get that, that’s fine. Mind you at the same time there are lots of things I hear on the radio that I think are really well done and I’m a fan, but for me I don’t want to do that. I like this, for better or for worse.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne