By Larry Schwartz
MORE than 20 years after a planned Australian tour fell through, Bruce Hornsby says he might finally perform here. “There is a big festival that we have heard about that wants us to come over there,” says the Virginia-based singer-songwriter, pianist and accordion player. “Maybe next year I will do that. I hope I will.” Meanwhile, Australian fans will settle for his new 25-track double live album, Bride of the Noisemakers recorded between 2007-2009 with longtime band, The Noisemakers.He says his approach continues to evolve and listeners will hear significant differences to the approach on the previous live album, Here Come the Noisemakers, just over a decade earlier. Hornsby has played on more than 100 albums by the likes of Bob Dylan, Don Henley and the Grateful Dead, with whom he played more than 100 shows; his songs were featured on Spike Lee movies.
Is it a coincidence that Bride of the Noisemakers has been released on the 25th anniversary of your first big hit, The Way it Is?
There is no planning there. It just happens to be the time we wanted to release this record because we wanted to tour behind it. It starts in the spring and goes through the summer. …There is nothing on that first record that is on this record. It is no stroll down memory lane. Our career has never been about that and this record is not about that. It is really about what we sound like now ….I think it is clear that our approach to playing music is such that we are always interested in allowing my songs to grow and evolve. And so if you hear us play a song in 2004 and you hear us play it in 2011 most likely it’s changed. It’s still the same song. It’s still the same words, the same chords. We might change that sometimes. But I like being able to dress the songs in new clothes here and there. It is to me a real creative prison to have to play the song the way you recorded it.
How would you characterise these 25 tracks? What are your listeners hearing?
Well, hopefully they are hearing an exuberant, joyful noise: a sound with a lot of spirit, a lot of energy. I would hope that they would hear the fun in it. I hope that they will hear that we have a great time playing. And I think it’s because of this approach. I think if you go and hear a group or you go and hear a solo singer songwriter and you watch the band playing, I think so often you will see they don’t look like they’re having much fun up there … It’s often, here’s the set list for the year. Everything is the same. Even the in-between song patter, the in-between song raps are, Good evening Cleveland, are you ready to rock? So our thing is the exact opposite approach. I’ve always been that way. I got a degree in jazz music at the University of Miami so I have always been a fairly restless soul musically. I have never really wanted to stay static. I’ve always been interested in continuing to be inspired.
You have said you were burned out from being on the road?
About a year and a half ago now.
… And you were taking a break long enough to allow you to enjoy it again. I was wondering what had happened during that break. Is there a new studio album on the way?
So many things. Just to be clear about the burnt out statement. I never burned out on the playing. If you heard me playing during the fall of 2009 you would have seen the same enjoyment coming off the stage. I think you could feel it very clearly. It’s just the other 21 hours of the day. That’s the part that is a grind when you have been doing it a long time. But I also thought it was time to reinvent our band’s profile; where we play and who we play for. And so I felt the need to take a year and make some very clear steps to try to make our band more known and more popular, frankly, because if nobody wants to come to see you then you don’t have a career any more. I got to the point where my solo piano concerts were outdrawing my band concerts. And so I felt it was time to move to a new playing field with our band. And so we are trying to play more places with no seats. We are playing a lot of festivals. And so you will see us on the Bonnaroo Festival, the Summer Camp Festival…. Lots of those kinds of festivals.
As I looked at the list of places where you are playing, I don’t see Australia.
Well unfortunately, I have never been there and it is a sad fact. I am not happy about it. I’m not proud of it. We were supposed to come there in 1988 but something happened I forget what. I really don’t remember why. The tour ended up getting cancelled. It didn’t happen and I have never been back and frankly there has never been… I have never felt much interest from promoters there. Every now and then somebody will throw us a line but we haven’t taken it yet.
One of your sons is named for Leon Russell and you produced an album for him in the 1990s; the other son is named for Keith Jarrett.
That’s exactly right.
Leon Russell toured here recently. He has had a lot of attention recently and been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame finally.
I think he is really underappreciated and it is great that Elton John has made this record with him and that that has helped bring him back into the light a little bit. I’m really happy about that for Leon.
Russell and Jarrett have obviously must have played a big a part in your music.
Yeah, you can hear that on the new record on the second song, Country Doctor, not the very top intro — that’s more something that I do — but then when the band kicks in I’m playing some high octaves that are very much in the Leon mould, very much something that I copped from him. And Keith Jarrett’s influence is here and there throughout. So I guess I wear my influences on my sleeve. Increasingly I am more influenced by modern classical music and there is a lot of that referenced on the Bride of the Noisemakers record. There is a bit of a Charles Ives. There is part of an Elliott Carter piece, a great 102-year-old classical composer. There is some Samuel Barber, Anton Webern the great Austrian composer. Unfortunately a part of my poor unsuspecting audience likes their music very straight and very unadventurous. I regularly inflict that on them, increasingly as I age. I take it further out. That increasingly influences my songwriting, most notably on a musical play we have written called Sick Bastard.
To what extent has your work with the Grateful Dead influenced your approach to live performance?
I think that the Grateful Dead are the archetypal improvisatory rock band. For many years the spontaneity level was very high and was sort of a model for any band who was doing that. I guess them and the Allman Brothers. Our approach is like this: it is not about a long solo, a long jam. Someone will play a lick in the middle of a song and I will hear that and play it back at them and then I will play it with them and we will play back together. Then that will become a new section, sort of like instant composing in the middle of a song or at the end of a song or in the intro, wherever it happens. And that can happen at any time. (Its) a very conversational approach, allowing the possibility for things to become new at any moment. And we have some very dexterous players in our band who are very adept at turning on a dime. So that is our approach which is really different than the other groups that we are talking about. But I was very impressed by the Dead as songwriters. Like Leon Russell I think they are really underappreciated as songwriters. In fact, interestingly enough, to illustrate the point with the new record, I wrote a song with the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter and that is the first song on Bride of the Noisemakers and then the very last song is a great Garcia-Hunter song called Standing on the Moon. So we have Robert Hunter bookends on our new record.
Can you tell me about the title?
..It’s the sequel to Here Come the Noisemakers live record from 10 years ago. And so what better title for a sequel than Bride of Frankenstein, Bride of the Noisemakers?
The other thing that strikes me is your eclecticism in working jazz or bluegrass musicians, from Jack DeJohnette to Ricky Skaggs. You have been telling me about modern classical composers. There is a sense that you embrace genres without allowing yourself to be hemmed in.
Well, people would really love to hem me in and hem anyone in because people like to label you. I have been typecast for years as that guy who had those five or six hits in the mid to late 1980s and that is fine. Those people remind me of the older people in our audience that look like country club members, businessmen in golf shirts and leisure clothes who deal with our music from an uninformed position. I can’t help them. It’s their problem…
Rhythms, June 2011
Larry Schwartz Writer 