Category: music
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America's most underrated musical genius | Bruce Hornsby
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Bruce Hornsby with The Grateful Dead performing at Soldier Field on July 4, 2015 in Chicago. Jay Blakesberg/Invision for the Grateful Dead/AP Images
I’m not going to go into a long, winding diatribe about how and why and when Bruce became a humble god living among us mortals. He’d just deny it. Instead, I’ll show you.
Hell, this is from 1999. There’s another 20 years of new stuff to take in from there, and he’s still going. Not now, of course. Pandemic, anyone?
You certainly know him from the title track from his debut album, The Way It Is, but that was back in 1986. What did he do from 1986 to 1999? Hmm…
- The Way It Is (1986)
- Scenes From The Southside (1988)
- A Night On The Town (1990)
- Harbor Lights (1993)
- Hot House (1995, a personal favorite… fantastic album)
- Spirit Trail (1998)
Not to mention countless live shows, playing with the Grateful Dead (a lot.)
So, after this show, what more can you expect to find? Take a look…
- Here Come The Noisemakes (2000, a collection of live recordings from 1998 to 2000 as the Noisemakers would become his new band)
- Big Swing Face (2002)
- Halcyon Days (2004)
- Intersections (2006, an essential box-set of loads of unreleased material, live and studio)
- Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby (2007, some freaking amazing bluegrass)
- Camp Meeting (2007, an album of jazz tracks!, very lovely)
- Levitate (2009)
- Bride of The Noisemakers (2011, another live collection I can listen to all day long)
- Rehab Reunion (2016, where Bruce spends more time playing the dulcimer, and it’s amazing)
- Absolute Zero (2019)
For a more complete listing of almost everything Bruce has done, check out his discography on Wikipedia.
Bruce is a freaking space wizard. He’s a master at two-handed piano, and incorporates that skill into many tracks, like Spider Fingers from the Hot House album, and he loves to improvise when playing live, as you can see here…
Here’s the album version. See if you can pick out how each hand is playing…
Then, there’s all those times Bruce played with The Grateful Dead, and The Dead were always great with bootlegging, so here’s a show from 1990… with Bruce on the keys…
Set 1 Feel Like A Stranger, Althea, It's All Over Now, Ramble On Rose, El Paso, Brown Eyed Women, Greatest Story Ever…archive.org
All in all, Bruce makes fantastic music and I think you’ll love it all as much as I do, considering there’s tons to choose from. And if you love live shows as much as I do, then check out Nugs.net where you can purchase official “bootlegs” that are simply wonderful. There are numerous free shows to pick from, and they offer a lot of FLAC versions for most shows, all recorded from the board and sounding FABULOUS!!
If, when you look up from a five hour binging session are surprised that so much time has passed, I’ll happily take the blame ;)
XTC. You know. The band...
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I'm not a music critic, and I have a shitty memory, but there were some really interesting bands coming out of the late 70's and 80's. One of them was a little group called XTC. You likely know them for this...
It's just the audio version, so feel free to keep reading. When I was sort of growing up in Pasadena (long story) I spent many years listening to the then influential KROQ 106.7 FM. Back then KROQ was probably the single most powerful New Wave/Alternative station, driving much of what was getting heard back in the 80's. I was certainly tired of the pop and junk and had gotten into Progressive Rock with albums like Yes' Fragile, Jethro Tull's Aqualung, and Rush in general.
From the New Wave perspective, there were certainly a lot of very interesting acts, but most were trying to exploit the new, cheaper synths of the time, and while I liked some electronic, it wasn't something I liked to deep dive into. Instead I was into the Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, Echo and The Bunnymen, REM, The Smiths, early U2, Tears for Fears, Midnight Oil, Talking Heads, X, The B-52's, Madness, Oingo Boingo, The English Beat, The Specials (yeah, I was into Ska) and others.
One band that I liked but never seemed to get into, however, was XTC. How disappointing.
In the last few years, I've been revisiting my foundations in 70's and 80's music and have started to re-collect some of the better stuff I was listening to back then. It's easy to get new copies of most of the stuff I used to listen to, though. It's not so easy to start digging into bands without knowing their albums, so I started poking around YouTube to refresh my memory. I've discovered an amazingly rich, eclectic, and forward-thinking band that could be easily placed in the same category as Talking Heads and other influential groups that started in the late 70's. Take this track from 1979 as an example...
1979? Really?! This is some tight alternative that sounds more at home in the late 80's, not early on in the 2nd British Invasion. Radio was really everything back then. I felt I was an adventurous musical soul. I was into progressive, new wave/alt, hard rock, heavy metal, jazz, jazz rock, funk, some punk (I loved X), some pop, and even some movie soundtracks. I bought albums, tapes and later CDs. Radio and friends, however, were the only real sources of what was coming out. Back then, kids didn't think about Rolling Stone magazine and the Internet wasn't even a dream.
So, now I'm a couple of years away from turning 50, and I find out about XTC.
Lucky me. Really :) Check out one more...
1980. Yeah. Amazing.