Few contemporary music men have embraced the role of American troubadour like Bruce Hornsby. He cracks jokes, shakes his head in bewilderment at days gone by, and—judging by his broad roster of famous collaborators—is equally comfortable lending favors as calling them in. Since the 1991 breakup of his first band the Range, he’s played keys for the Grateful Dead, played jazz with Jack DeJohnette and bluegrass with Ricky Skaggs, and released a dulcimer album. (He also, legend has it, beat Allen Iverson in a game of one-on-one.)
Hornsby’s spent the last decade scoring Spike Lee Joints, and cinematic cues enlivened 2019’s Absolute Zero as well as its quick follow-up Non-Secure Connection. Non-Secure Connection’s arresting opener “Cleopatra Drones” showcases Hornsby’s ability to wrest resonant imagery from childlike turns of phrase, his layered vocals evoking a desert apocalypse of marching animals and “shoebox satellites.” Percussion sneaks in around the track’s halfway point, building a head of steam en route to a climactic keyboard solo. Similarly atmospheric production buoys “Time, the Thief,” on which Hornsby’s piano sails atop a symphonic horn arrangement.
As ever, Hornsby’s wistful, elegant melodies are the main attraction. A winding sitar and stand-up bass grab your attention on the unearthed Leon Russell collaboration “Anything Can Happen,” but it’s the earnest piano chords that make it such a winning ballad. Like much of the album, the James Mercer vocal duet “My Resolve” is grounded in cataclysmic themes; each verse and instrumental solo is its own roiling descent, each chorus an oasis of reprieve. And while Jamila Woods’s guest spot is the big-tent draw on “Bright Star Cast,” it’s driven by Hornsby and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s thick electro-funk. The engineering is crisp and capacious, their playing loose and lively.
Of the dozens of character sketches scattered across Hornsby’s 35-year recording career, the most infamous are from Reagan’s second term. In the Range’s 1986 FM-radio breakthrough “The Way It Is,” a song about the insufficiency of the Civil Rights Act, a silk-suited businessman harrasses a woman waiting in a welfare line. This was followed in 1988 by “Look Out Any Window,” a Mellencamp-ian survey of farmers and fishermen casting weary eyes at the decade’s horizon. Rather than oppositional forces, Hornsby cast the urban poor and the red state/blue-collar demo as brothers of a widening underclass, sharing interests (organized labor) and antagonists (politicos, slick salesmen, small towns and small-mindedness).
But Hornsby’s writing actually improved when he became less of a prognosticator. By 2004’s Halcyon Days, a middle-aged manifesto of a piece with Billy Joel’s The Bridge and Mellencamp’s Key West records, he narrowed his focus to subtler narrative intersections, the sort of generational divides which tend to come up more in passing and less at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Shortly before Warren Zevon’s death, Hornsby began performing Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long,” a portrait of rural patriarchy gone to seed, in concerts; Non-Secure Connection’s “Shit’s Crazy Out Here” adds a layer of post-modern paranoia to the woebegone flippancy of Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”
For all his hip affiliations and progressive politics, Hornsby acknowledges his old soul happily enough. As on Halcyon Days, Non-Secure Connection’s characters are compromised less by the objective state of things than by their struggles to keep up. On the title track, a hacker likens himself to a Trojan warrior, yet can’t quite articulate the joy he finds in sowing chaos online. Later, on “Porn Hour,” an internet porn addict considers the onward trudge of technology: “The innovation of the internet was driven by a couple on a film set/We thank the hard boys and the naked girls, for the coming of our beautiful cyberworld.” I’m not sure I ever needed to hear the “Mandolin Rain” guy marvel aloud at the wonders of PornHub, but now that I have I’m not even mad about it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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