When people tell you they remember exactly where they were when JFK was shot, they don’t often add that the room erupted in cheers and shouts of: “Hooray! Nixon can take over!” Speaking via Zoom from his home in Williamsburg, Virginia, one of the oldest towns in the US, Bruce Hornsby shrugs and says: “Well, that was my experience!” It was the day before his ninth birthday and the whoops of delight came from his classmates, all of which is recalled on an impressionistic track from his new album Indigo Park: “I was really alarmed and confused / Watching the children parroting parents’ views.”
Until now, Hornsby has rarely written autobiographical lyrics, so people don’t know all that much about him. His biggest song, The Way It Is, was a piece of social commentary, the product of a liberal upbringing in the segregated south. Hornsby’s aunt was a prominent voice in support of integration in the 1960s, when most local white communities were still battling against it.
Since that unlikely hit, with its two mesmerising jazz piano solos, Hornsby has made the music he wanted to make, much of it under the radar. But he’s had sudden, mainstream acclaim in his early 70s following a period of mad productivity (four studio albums in five years). These days, he is a guest on “big ass” podcasts in the US, like The Adam Friedland Show, where he recently appeared between governor of California Gavin Newsom (“the pretty boy”) and mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani (“the communist”). Hornsby has worked so long outside the critical conversation that I wonder if it’s irksome to suddenly be welcomed into it. “Well,” he says, “it’s nicer than being ignored!”
Hornsby is dry and somewhat zany, but he has an innocence about him. In the hallway outside his studio, from where he’s making this call, there is a wall displaying his musical influences. “Do you remember that poster of Leon Russell nearly naked and showing his pubes?” he says. “I’ve got that up, next to pictures of Elliott Carter and Ligeti, the moderns – and pictures of Bill Evans and Bud Powell. Look, I’ll show you.” He picks up his iPad and moves across the room; freezes when the internet goes, gives up, comes back, sits down, and becomes animated once more.
He studied jazz in Miami the year below Pat Metheny, and did a stint at the prestigious Berklee College in Boston. At the age of 40, a new father to identical twin boys, he locked himself away for six months with the piano just to improve his left hand. In some ways he is a kind of pop Keith Jarrett: he has a respect for the everyday gorgeousness of American rock and folk – what he calls the “white note songs” – but he is drawn to the aural challenge of atonality. The chromatic stuff unsettles you, then he gives you the satisfying resolutions your ears are craving. At points, Indigo Park feels like a new kind of pop. “I wish you were reviewing it instead of doing an interview!” he says.
Hornsby was raised in Christian Science, and moved to LA for a time in his 20s where he played with Sheena Easton (he can be seen in the video for Sugar Walls) and wrote songs for Huey Lewis. He was an unofficial member of the Grateful Dead in the early 90s, and unlike most of their other keyboard players remained vertical and above ground (he is very clean living). He has produced many political songs over the years, such as his critique of Reaganite economics, The End of the Innocence, written with Don Henley – and he did his Donald Trump satire back in 2006 (The Don of Dons). He sang it in Trump’s face at a Knicks game, but Trump liked it, and gave him two business cards. These days, the world is not funny, and he is off the political satire for now. “I think it takes a very clever person to write a song about Trump – or Gavin Newsom, if that’s your persuasion – and make it somehow artful.”
When I ask if the sense of a growing audience has encouraged a more personal record, he replies: “Hmm, I just thought, ‘This is giving me chills, to write about my life in this way.’” His entire career seems to have been conducted in the pursuit of goosebumps – musical phrases, or chord changes, that give him the shivers. But his own shivers are not enough to tell him if a song is working. If Hornsby thinks he might have written a decent bit of music, he drives into the centre of Williamsburg, finds his elder brother Bobby – a construction manager who built Bruce’s big white weatherboard house – or one of his friends, and plays it to them in the car. But make no mistake: he is not just watching their reaction. “What’s more important than their reaction is my reaction,” he says. “Because there’s something very real going on here, called, ‘Hearing music through other people’s ears.’ It’s tangible, it’s psychological. The air in the room changes somehow.”
He has described Indigo Park as “an old bastard looking back on life”. While the odd, unboundaried music sounds young, time and mortality hang over it. One song was inspired by a dream in which his father, an old country boy who died in 1998, entered his bedroom: he is so moved recalling it that he is unable to speak. Then he tells me about another dream where his father was friends with Aaron Dessner of the National. “My dad was a great character,” he concludes. The late Robert Hornsby had a saying to comfort anyone who’d been let down, or felt misunderstood, by friends. “He used to say, ‘Eff ’em all but six – five for the pallbearers and one to piss on the grave.’”
Hornsby is still on the road for many months of the year: solo winter tours in the music halls of the east coast, just him and a piano; festival tours with his jam band the Noisemakers in the warmer part of the year. “I can’t believe I’m doing so many dates,” he says, looking alarmed. “I won’t do much backstage stuff this time. I have to be careful these days. If you come backstage, I’ll let you in.”
• Indigo Park is out on 3 April
