A Conversation With Bruce Hornsby – HuffPost 4.29.11

Mike Ragogna: Hey Bruce, what’s going on?

Bruce Hornsby: Hey Mike, just grinding away on the road. How have you been?

MR: Pretty well since the last visit, which feels like a month ago. Bruce, you’ve got a new album, Bride Of The Noisemakers, which especially celebrates your last few albums and playing out on the road. What has the experience been like, playing those tours?

BH: Well, actually this double record draws from shows from ’07, ’08 and ’09–so three different tours. Most songwriters approach the playing of their songs in what I call “the museum piece” manner. That is, they write the song, record the song, and then they play it pretty much that way for the rest of their lives. For me, I like my songs to be living beings that can grow, change, and evolve, so consequently, my approach is very different. I like to find new clothes to dress the songs up in. We’re always looking to reinvent the songs, find new aspects of the songs, and discover new areas for the songs to live in. Because of that, if you hear a version of ours from ’09, and you hear a version of the same song from ’04, they would often be very different–the way I sing them, and the grooves could be different. We have so many different ways of playing “The Way It Is.” They way we play it now is very different from the record, it’s very much coming from my solo piano version of it, and I could just go on and on because it’s just continuously reinventing itself. I thought it was time to document where our music is now, and what we sound like now because it’s very different than something like Here Come The Noise Makers, which was put out ten years ago, our first live record.

MR: What’s nice about this project is that you’re visiting the later material, which catches everybody up, and it does show the living, breathing, creative process you talk about.

BH: Well, I guess you’re saying that as opposed to putting out another tired record with another version of some old hits.

MR: Exactly.

BH: That would just never do. If somebody wanted us to do that–that’s just so uncreative. That said, we could do that because the way we play them now is very different from the way they were originally recorded, so that would be a creative document, or something of some worth artistically. At the same time, we kind of did that on Here Come The Noise Makers in ’01. There were probably four or five of our hits on that record, and once again, they sounded nothing like the originals. Or they might have been versions of the songs that I wrote that were hits for other people, like “End Of Innocence,” which I wrote with Don Henley, or “Jacob’s Ladder,” which my brother and I wrote for Huey Lewis. We still play those songs, and they hold up just great for me. There are one or two of the hits that don’t really hold up, and it’s easily discovered which ones they are because they don’t show up on our set lists. But most of them age well, and if they don’t, we try to change them so they do fit our aesthetic of the moment. Now, you say it’s recent material, but there is at least one song from our second record on here, from ’88–“Defenders Of The Flag.” It’s not like we’re trying to just make it songs from the last ten or fifteen years. There are songs from ’93, “Harbor Lights” and “Talk Of The Town,” and it’s really from almost the whole 25 year period of time that I’ve been making records.

MR: That’s right, and it was about 25 years ago that you won the Best New Artist Grammy, right?

BH: Well, the record was released that allowed us to win the next year. We were nominated in ’87 for the ’86 Best New Artist award. So, if you want to be really specific about it, it was pretty much exactly 25 years ago this month that our first record, The Way It Is, was released.

MR: That album meant a lot to me and my old musical partner Steve Mosto because we were on the road dying to hear something on the radio that we related to. Almost out of nowhere, we heard your “Every Little Kiss,” and it so resonated with us that we rushed out to get the album and played it in the car at least 20 or 30 times.

BH: (laughs) Well, that’s nice to hear. The songs hold up very well to me, but I have a hard time listening to the versions because I feel it’s evolved to a much greater place now. That said, I’m happy to hear you say that, and happy that it got you through your long drives.

MR: You talked before about how these songs are always evolving. You’ve done so many different styles that it almost seems unfair to put any genres around you. You mix jazz, bluegrass, classical, rock, pop–it’s all Bruce Hornsby music–and the best example is when you used that excerpt from “Barber’s Sonata” to start “Gonna Be Some Changes Made.” How does this come to you? How do you get inspired?

BH: If you’re listening closely, there is a funny moment that is captured on the Bride Of The Noise Makers record there. The track starts with just some audience sounds–people milling around–and you hear somebody yell, “Barber!” Then, you hear me go, “Barber?” So, I lit into the fourth movement of his Sonata, one of the great piano pieces of the 20th century. The fourth movement, particularly, may be the best fugue written in the 20th century. That movement is fourteen pages long, though I only know six of them by heart. So, I go through that whole bit, and then “Gonna Be Some Changes Made” comes in, and when that groove came it, I kept playing the sonata over that. So, it just comes about very naturally and spontaneously, just like you can hear. Someone in my audience knows of that music, and they’ll scream it out–and I’ll always placate that person. If someone is screaming out for “Valley Road,” “Every Little Kiss,” or “Mandolin Rain,” I might not necessarily give that person what they’re looking for because it’s living a little too much in the past, which I’m not against, but it just doesn’t excited me. Somebody is screaming out Elliott Carter, which is another composer that I have some music from in here. Most people don’t know who he is, but he’s an amazing composer, and he’s now one-hundred-two years old, and he wrote the piece that I play a little bit of on the record in ’06, when he was ninety-seven or ninety-eight–he’s absolutely amazing. So, if someone is screaming out a name like that, I know it’s somebody who is really deeply involved, and I like to reward the people that are deeply involved.

MR: You’re a University Of Miami alumni.

BH: That’s right, I went to three schools, The University Of Richmond my first year, where I realized that real college was a bad match for me. Then, I went to Berklee College Of Music, and lasted two semesters there, and then moved on and found the right fit for me, which was The University Of Miami, where I went for my last two years. Amazingly enough, all of my credits kept transferring from school to school, so I was still able to graduate in four years, even though I went to three colleges in those four years. My last two years at University Of Miami were very important to me in my development because I had a really tough, great teacher, Vince Maggio, who I still consider to be my teacher. I’m still looking to please Vince in my music. I think what you’re getting to is that three years ago I started a new music program there called, The Creative American Music Program. So, now you can go to Miami, and in the halls of academia, learn how to write, sing, and play all the traditions of American folk music, from blues, gospel, country, and bluegrass, to shape note singing, sacred heart music, and on and on. It’s a songwriter’s program, but it’s also a player’s program because, like I said, you’re learning how to write, sing, and play in these styles.

MR: I don’t know why it took so long, but the conservatory type of atmosphere has been broadened to include these genres, and to look at music in such a way that embraces all these other genres respectfully.

BH: It’s really about learning the traditions of music that really have influenced and informed the songwriting of today–certainly rock and pop music songwriting. A lot of music is really coming from the old traditions of blues, gospel, folk and country. We’ve had some great guests come and play–Lamont Dozier came down to do a concert, and I had Shawn Colvin come down last year. It’s just growing and growing to the point that we’ve got a lot of applicants, but we can only accept so many–it’s a very popular program.

MR: Are you involved in the oversight of all this?

BH: Yeah, a bit from afar. I show up two or three times a year and check up with it. I’ve been a part of these concerts where I reinvented a Lamont Dozier tune for his concert and sang with Shawn Colvin, my old friend, who just sat in with me at the beautiful, brand newAustin City Limits venue that they have.

MR: The Moody Theater?

BH: Yeah, exactly right, way to go.

MR: One thing that I wanted to emphasize about you is that you’re not only reinventing your own songs, but you embrace other people’s material. For instance, on this new album you have the medley “Fortunate Son/Comfortably Numb”…

BH: …that’s right, and some people who aren’t really aware of my music so much think that I’m doing a John Fogerty song into a Pink Floyd song, where, in fact, it’s my song, “Fortunate Son,” which is a song I wrote out of a book I read called Fortunate Son, an autobiography by a man named Lewis Puller, son of the great Marine hero Chester Puller, who was trying to follow in his father’s footsteps and enlisted into Vietnam, where he got his legs blown off. Now, the reason I wrote it, musically, is because in ’92, I went over to Spain, where I was part of the Legends Of Guitar festival, helping Robbie Robertson with his band. Robbie and I had written a song for his album, Storyville, and he asked me if I would help him put together this band for this gig he was going. Then, I got a fax out of the blue from Roger Waters, before we got over there, saying, “I understand you’re coming over here with Robbie. Would you sing ‘Comfortably Numb’ with me, on my set which follows Robbie’s?” I did that, and it was a transcendent moment for me, and I just loved this song. I had never heard that song because when these Pink Floyd records were big, in the ’80s, I was listening to Coltrane and Bill Evans, so I had really missed it. I heard Van Morrison’s version of it on Roger Waters’ The Wall, and it just floored me, so I learned it the way Van sang it. When I came back from all this, it had moved me so much that I though, “I want to write a song that has this same feeling.” So, I try to do this with “Fortunate Son,” and gradually, we’ve started playing “Fortunate Son” into “Comfortable Numb,” so now we call it “Fortunately Numb.”

MR: (laughs) Nice.

BH: So, that’s on this album almost by popular demand. Like I said, it’s one of the most popular songs for our true fans.

MR: What’s funny is that I’m very familiar with your song “Fortunate Son,” but when I posed the question, I actually had forgotten about the Creedence version of it.
BH: That’s a bad tune–bad meaning good. I love it. I love John Fogerty’s writing, and that’s one of the great ones, but I did have someone in an interview about a week ago say, “So, I see you’re covering Fogerty there, huh?”

MR: (laughs)

BH: It’s okay. I don’t expect people to know all this music. To me, most of the best music happens under the mainstream radar screen, but unfortunately, hardly anyone knows that music. I feel that most of the best music I’ve made is not music that has been on the radio, but I feel like that about all music, whether it’s The Grateful Dead, The Band, or The Allman Brothers, for instance. Those three groups were hardly ever on the radio–none of them. So, for those who typecast me…they’re uninformed, which is okay.

MR: Well, we just talked about the school, and then about all the great music out there that flies under the radar. That said, what is your advice for new artists?

BH: Well, these days, it’s so hard to get attention and to establish and retain a career of music of any length. It’s so difficult now that my advice would be not to follow any trends. Don’t try to write in the current style because by the time you figure it out, they’ll be on the next style, and you’ll look back at years of trend chasing where you’re always behind it. I would just say be true to yourself and find your own unique voice rather than trying to figure out some notion of commerciality and how to be successful in that way.

MR: And that’s how you did it?

BH: Well, it’s funny because for many years, I was trying to write “hit” music. I was a songwriter for 20th Century Fox, and that leads me to a good story that kind of goes with my advice there. I was a songwriter for 20th Century Fox, and they signed me because they thought I was going to be an artist that was going to make records and have success. So, I was trying to write songs for others and trying to write commercial music, whatever that was–my notion of it, anyway. It was unfulfilling, one, and it was unsuccessful, two. I was beating my head against a wall trying to get a record contract with this music. Finally, just out of frustration with several aspects–for one, the band I had at the time playing my songs would always leave me walking away from rehearsals thinking, “Man, I thought this song was better than this, but I guess it’s no good.” Finally, I just said, “I’m going to make a tape with a drum machine, and me playing synth bass, and everything will come out of my head.” It was the least commercial tape I had ever made, and when my two brothers heard it, they said, “Wow, this is you for the first time. It’s purely you, it’s completely unique, and it my be completely non-commercial, but it’s really true, and it has something very special about it.” Sure enough, that “least commercial tape I ever made,” was the tape that got me signed by the major label. So, it’s a good story that shows that people in the record companies just want to be moved. The guy who signed me at RCA, beautifully enough, was the old rhythm guitar player for The Zombies, Paul Atkinson. He signed me, and he didn’t necessarily think it was commercial, he just couldn’t stop listening to it because it moved him–he just couldn’t take it out of his cassette player.

MR: Wow.

BH: That’s a good story that shows that if you just try to find yourself, it’s the best way to go.

MR: That’s beautiful. For the tours between ’07 and ’09, the Noise Makers are basically guys that have been with you for a long time, right?

BH: Yeah, the longest tenured member of the band, J.T. Thomas, has been with me for twenty-one years. The rookie of the band, Sonny Emory, has been with the band for nine years. So, it’s a good long run, and people tend to come and stay because our approach is fun for a musician–it’s not your standard museum piece approach.

MR: How much improvisation is there in a live performance, from you and from the band?

BH: Oh, so much. It’s always about reinvention and finding new clothes to dress the songs in.

MR: Have you played with these guys for so long that you all know where everybody is going musically for the most part?

BH: Well, I try to keep it interesting and to keep it unpredictable. I think if you would ask them, they would say, “Yes, we, a lot of the time, know where he’s going to go. But quite often, he fools us, and that’s what we like.” I hope that’s what they would say. It’s a really conversational approach. One person will play a line, or a lick–like we were playing “Rainbow’s Cadillac” the other night, and Doug, the guitar player, was playing a solo with a certain lick in there, and I went, “Oh, that’s my next move.” So, I took that and broke down the band and started singing the chorus to the tune of the lick Doug had just played. That’s a perfect example of somebody just playing some musical germ of an idea, some melodic fragment, and that becoming the next section. That’s the sort of thing that we do all the time, and it continues to make the music new. It really is spontaneous, and the guys are always welcoming that.

MR: When you do an older song, “The Way It Is” for example, do you guys play around with it to the point of even blending it with maybe what Tupac did to it?

BH: Well, we haven’t done that because I’d feel a little idiotic trying to rap–I’d feel like a complete clown doing that. Every now and then, I’ve quoted one of his lyrics in the song, but the way we’re playing “The Way It Is” these days is the arrangement that I play when I play solo piano concerts. I think soon we’re going to start playing it in a whole new way, and that’s the bluegrass version of it–the way the Skaggs & Hornsby group plays it, which is just fantastic. I’m hoping we can find a way to approximate the feeling that I get when I play with Ricky Skaggs and his band because it’s a fabulous version of “The Way It Is.”

MR: Nice. And I can’t let you get away without telling the readers that you did get a Grammy for the “Valley Road” bluegrass version.

BH: Yeah, that’s right. So, we’re well versed in turning things into a bluegrass style. The way we’ve played “Jacob’s Ladder,” for many years now, is very bluegrassy. We played “Valley Road” bluegrass, which is the one that won the Grammy years ago, and pissed off all the purists that think Bill Monroe should win every year–and I don’t necessarily disagree with them, but I’m very proud of the record we made, and it holds up.

MR: And you’re going to be touring, of course, to support this new album?

BH: Oh, like crazy. We’re touring with Bela Fleck, so it’s the Bela and Bruce show, with The Flecktones and The Noise Makers in July and August around the country. Our band is touring right now, and then in June, we’re doing several dates, including the Bonnaroo Festival. We’re also doing, in May, the Summer Camp Festival, which is Umphrey McGee’s festival. We’re doing some dates after the Flecktones/Noise Makers tour at the great Wolf Trap venue with The Punch Brothers. We’re playing with the group Tea Leaf Green and we’ll be playing with Gregg Allman up in Connecticut, in late August and Early September. So, there’s lot’s of things going on. We’re pretty much booked into October, and then I’m booked through next April with a solo piano tour that will accompany a “solo concerts” record that I’ll be putting out then. Then, there’s our play, Sick Bastard, which is moving onward and outward. We had our first production in Norfolk, it was really successful, but not great. The Book Of Mormon is great–we’re not as good as them.

MR: (laughs) Will you come back and talk about that musical at some point?

BH: Sure, no problem. I guess I’ve been long-winded and have bored the hell out of you, but I apologize for all of my shortcomings.

MR: No, you have been great Bruce, as usual. Thanks for spending some time with me and giving me another interview. You are still one of my favorite artists and what you do in the realm of…whatever we can call your style, is an amazing thing. I just want to thank you for trying to bridge all that music and make people understand that music really is united on a basic level.

BH: Well, you know, R. Crumb, the great cartoonist, has a book you can buy calledPortraits Of Jazz, Blues, And Country. So many people in the rock area basically just deal with blues and country, but they stop at the jazz because it’s such a difficult instrumental pursuit. Some people may not be interested on a certain level…maybe it’s too complex, esoteric, or inaccessible. But I dealt with the jazz, and increasingly, modern classical as well, so I’m interested in that aspect of playing my instrument well. So, I’m in the R. Crumb school (laughs).

MR: (laughs) We have time for one last song for the radio broadcast portion of this interview. What would you like to hear?

BH: Play “Tango King.” That’s a good fest of joyful noise. And don’t try to clap to it because it’s in 9/8. Well, you can clap to it, just beware.

MR: (laughs) I’ll try my best man. Thank you again, Bruce.

BH: Thanks Mike. It was nice talking to you.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney