Bruce Hornsby will do a lot of things—join the Grateful Dead, write a hit with Don Henley, celebrity-coach the UVA basketball team—but he won’t do blow. In “Silhouette Shadows," a nearly six-minute song from his lively new album, Indigo Park, the 71-year-old songwriter enters a rare kind of flow state with an intricately composed melody that somehow feels improvised and lyrics that sound stream-of-conscious but build to something quietly profound. Weaving between his piano lines, he recalls watching Nixon resign through somebody’s window (“Good thing I’m tall”), feeling cognitive dissonance after his fellow classmates celebrated when JFK’s assassination resulted in a day off from school, and taking a tell-tale journey to meet a “big-time producer” and declining an offer of cocaine: “Instant ostracism," he sings sadly.
The anecdote comes off less like an afterschool special and more like a reflection on the strange in-between zones where Hornsby has always thrived. His flawless first two albums, 1986’s The Way It Is and 1988’s Scenes From the Southside, are more-or-less synonymous with the sound we now refer to as “adult contemporary,” but to watch him perform those hits in concert is to realize how much inspiration he drew from visceral, visionary jazz players like Keith Jarrett. And for a Best New Artist Grammy winner whose most visible work in the ’90s came through hip-hop samples by 2Pac and E-40, few listeners would imagine just how influential he would become on 21st-century festival headliners like Bon Iver and Haim, who rank among his collaborators in this prolific, eccentric new phase in his career.
It’s a period I’ve referred to as “the Hornsbissaince,” as his smooth keyboard sound and loping, heartland rhythms have been embraced across genres and generations that might have once passed him off as ’80s cheese. And yet, even in his new position as hip elder statesman, Hornsby remains restless: flitting between modern classical-leaning work with the experimental ensemble yMusic and a trio of more accessible, guest-heavy solo records drawing on his film work with Spike Lee. On Indigo Park, he splits the difference between these late-era modes, creating a kind of career overview of all new material, accompanied by a roster of guests who help illustrate his myriad, enduring strengths. It’s classic Hornsby: both squirrely and crowd-pleasing, weirder than you’d expect but as traditionally, autobiographically confessional as he’s ever allowed himself.
Whichever Hornsby you seek, you will find him here. Were you introduced to his music through his millennial indie torchbearers? Then you’ll be pleased to find Ezra Koenig on the jittery, hooky “Memory Palace.” For the music nerds intrigued by his later turns toward the esoteric, have fun transcribing the nearly atonal “Alabama,” which interpolates an etude by the Hungarian avant-garde composer György Ligeti. And to the old-school fans who still listen for the “Mandolin Rain” in any summer storm, get your lighters out for “Take a Light Strain,” a piano-ballad anthem that, given slicker production, could fit right on those early records. “Ecstatic,” with longtime friend and collaborator Bonnie Raitt, even suggests he’s been revisiting his old-school hip-hop collaborations from back in the day. As evidenced by “Silhouette Shadows," my favorite song here and the one that feels the most like new territory, the tone is nostalgic, dotted with the Southern landscapes of his Virginia childhood and the weathered outlook of a writer whose friends, more and more often, seem to visit only to say goodbye.
Some of those friends are with him here. In “Might As Well Be Me, Florinda,” we hear posthumous lyrics from Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter and a guest verse from the late Bob Weir in one of his final recordings. Digitally tweaked to fit the syncopated rhythm and stay on key, Weir’s vocals have a discomfiting quality that’s almost certainly unintentional—especially considering how often the beauty of the Dead lied in their very human imperfections. But then Blake Mills comes along and delivers one of his most emotional and inspired guitar solos, a breathtaking contribution that revives the energy of the track and the whole second half of the record with it. Even more moving, it’s got just the type of soul that Jerry Garcia once brought to Hornsby’s records in the ’90s. And here we find Hornsby once again in his most comfortable position: a solitary spirit drifting through time, bringing people together and bringing out their best, finding the strange resolution in all the dissonance. Turns out, there’s no greater high on earth.
