Bruce Hornsby – HuffPost 10.25.12

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Bruce Hornsby: Oh boy, it’s so hard now. I get a lot of — I was going to say “tapes,” but I don’t get too many cassettes anymore. I get a lot of CDs and people sending me things on the Internet. I find that the level of musicianship is pretty good. it’s pretty strong. The people sing well, sing in tune, the players play solidly, but I guess this ties into the sort of theme of the day, when we were talking about Levon Helm or Spike or many other people I could mention. Robert Hunter or Garcia, all these people have something in common: They are original voices in whatever they do. They have a unique take, a unique point of view, a unique perspective on what they’re writing about and a unique way of performing this if they’re performers, whether it was Garcia or Levon or Spike in his film making. That’s what I find mostly lacking is a sense of artfulness, a sense of style and uniqueness of style. We see on TV all these music competitions, these singing competitions and it’s all about the great melodramatic moments [hums soulfully] you know, all that sort of thing and you go, “Well that’s great, and it’s very skillful and nice technique there,” but it’s sort of generic now. Everyone does it. It’s a lot of style and not a lot of substance. A lot of flash. And so I guess I would encourage people to dig deeper on an intellectual curiosity level and broaden their horizons in every way. If they’re songwriters who write words, read the great writers. Be inspired and broaden your horizons lyrically, and musically, the same way. I’m a lifelong student and I’m always looking to be inspired, looking for the next inspirational area to deal in, the next area that inspires me. Some of my fans wish the area that I’ve moved into lately I wouldn’t be into, which is modern classical music, which is very dissonant and chromatic. There’s a lot of utilization of chromaticism in harmonic language, meaning, you know, “weird” to people, not straight and safe.