Interview: Bruce Hornsby

To know the key to Bruce Hornsby’s success, look no further than a self-described desire to, “…improve, evolve, change, and grow.” That was the goal when he made what became 1998’s “Spirit Trail.”

Hornsby’s sixth studio album, which is being re-released as a 25th Anniversary Edition reissue digitally as well as in 3-CD and 3-LP configurations. It was not a commercial success the way earlier recordings like his 1986 debut “The Way It Is” and the 1988 sophomore follow-up “Scenes from the Southside” were.

But for the Virginia native, the double-album “Spirit Trail” not only sits high in estimation for both himself and his fan base, but made good on Hornsby’s nagging need to build on his craft, particularly when it came to his approach to piano.

“I was trying to write good songs, as I’ve always tried to do, but I was also working on my piano playing,” Hornsby recalled in an early September interview. “I rededicated myself to study the piano and one area in particular that is called two-handed independence, which is fully revealed on this record. I would describe it as sort of splitting your brain on the piano. Being able to play something with the left hand -- a pattern, an ostinato or a set of chords -- or just a groove and then being able to solo very freely rhythmically, that’s a very difficult thing to achieve. Boogie-woogie players are the closest (in the) rock world to this and a lot of those players are very good at this.”

While Hornsby’s stylistic tweaking started four years prior via some intense woodshedding he embarked on after turning 40, the musical fruits that came out of this intense self-improvement burst throughout “Spirit Trail.” That two-handed independence is in full flight throughout these 20 songs, whether it’s the Harper Lee-inspired “Sneaking Up on Boo Radley,” accentuated by minor key horn charts, the chugging opener “King Of the Hill,” or the breezy syncopated gem “Resting Place.” One of the more delightful cuts is “Sunflower Cat (Some Dour Cat) (Down With That),” a nod to his affinity for the Grateful Dead (who he’d been playing with extensively). It features a looped and sampled main lick from the band’s “China Cat Sunflower.”

It’s a choice that came out of a conversation with producer Michael Mangini, who was curious about the Dead’s appeal and finally got it after Hornsby played a piece of that particular Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter composition for him on the piano.

“When I played him ‘China Cat Sunflower’ [starts sounding out the piano rhythms], Mike just went, ‘Aw, that’s great. It sounds like a hip-hop groove’ because he was a hip-hop producer,” Hornsby explained. “He said we should make a song out of that little guitar part and intro. I told him Garcia played on my last three records -- 1990’s “Night On the Town,” 1993’s “Harbor Lights” and 1995’s “Hot House.” Now he’s gone, but what the hell. I want him on four records in a row. So that’s what we did and I wrote the song over that [riff].”

Having started out as a basketball jock in his hometown of Williamsburg, Hornsby became “…deeply into the piano in 11th grade and started it then. I got immersed in it. I couldn’t do without it,” and eventually hooked up to play Fender Rhodes and electric piano in his brother Bobby’s Grateful Dead cover band, Bobby Hi-Test and the Octane Kids at University of Virginia fraternity parties.

A committed jazz-bo (“I got deeply into Budd Powell, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, etc.,” Hornsby said), the pianist attended University of Richmond and Berklee College of Music in Boston before graduating as a jazz major from the University of Miami. Time spent as a session musician in Los Angeles in the early 1980s included stints in the soft rock band Ambrosia and as a Sheena Easton sideman. (You can see Hornsby in videos for “Strut” and “Sugar Walls.”)

And while Hornsby found commercial success after forming Bruce Hornsby and the Range in 1984, signing with RCA Records and eventually winning a 1987 Best New Artist Grammy, his career has found him being a musical seeker and incorporating swaths of bluegrass, jazz, and gospel into his subsequent recordings. It’s continued right on into his recent string of albums he refers to as “the modern era” (2019’s “Absolute Zero,” 2020’s “Non-Secure Connection” and 2022’s “‘Flicted”), which found him working with members of Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver, Living Colour and The Shins.

With 15 studio recordings under his belt, Hornsby is well aware of the challenge of “…placating the disparate interests of my fan base,” said. “I have people coming to the shows that only know the old hits and I have people coming to the shows that don’t want me to play any of those.” Somehow, he makes it all work.

“I have five or six songs from “Spirit Trail,” which is easy, although we are doing a couple that we hadn’t done before, which is fun,” he said. “Four to six hits and that takes up a lot of the shows. Three or four from the modern era, which are ones where I’ve been working with musicians from more of the indie crowd, which has been quite fulfilling and kind of amazing for grandpa to be reached out to by all these people. It’s been kind of amazing and beautiful. Then there will be three or four requests and favorites of ours -- songs like ‘Rainbow’s Cadillac’ and ‘White Wheeled Limousine,’ which were played by The Other Ones, the Grateful Dead band.

“Those are serious favorites for fans and for us. ‘Cyclone,’ the song I wrote with Robert Hunter is a favorite of fans and the band as well,” Hornsby said. “So that’s the schedule, sort of. There’s a back and forth with a little of this and a little of that. We won’t play six ‘Spirit Trail’ songs in a row. It’s interspersed.”

As someone whose musical range has found him going from being a quasi-official member of the Dead at one point to scoring films for Spike Lee for nearly roughly two-and-a-half decades, Hornsby’s creative engine shows no signs of slowing down. Next year, he’ll re-unite with New York chamber group yMusic in a project dubbed BrhyM that will find all involved touring behind an album recorded during the COVID-19 shutdown period right after the world started opening up again.

As for what keeps him going, it’s the idea of being his toughest self-critic.

“This is advice for someone trying to do this for a living and is deeply interested at really working at it,” he said. “Be your own toughest critic because everyone else will be. The world will rip you if they feel like it’s warranted. You be the tough guy first on yourself because most people hold other people to a higher standard than they tend to hold themselves. So being a tough self-critic can drive you crazy of course. I always say it’s about keeping the self-loathing at bay. This idea goes hand-in-hand with that idea. But that’s it.”

Hornsby comes to the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota on Nov. 9. Visit the Van Wezel website for ticket information.