WILLIAMSBURG’S BRUCE HORNSBY BRINGS MORE MUSIC AND PERSPECTIVE ABOUT LIFE
By Butch Maier / Photos By David McClister
As Indigo Park Pool in Williamsburg readied to open for the summer, the pool’s website proudly proclaimed, “We’re the real Indigo Park Pool—the one Bruce Hornsby wrote about.” The three-time Grammy Award-winning musician and native son released the album Indigo Park this year and sings in the title song about a party at the pool from his high school days. Hornsby shared more about the party during a phone interview ahead of his Coastal Virginia concert tour stop. If you’re wondering: Yes, he most likely will play The Way It Is. Some things almost never change. Yet, his feelings have changed—twice—about that No. 1 song from 40 years ago.
Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers
Indigo Park Tour
7:30 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 17
Presented by Virginia Arts Festival and CNU’s Ferguson Center for the Arts
Newport News
vafest.org
Coastal Virginia Magazine: Hey, Bruce. Thank you so much for your time.
Bruce Hornsby: “It’s my pleasure. I’ll have you know you’re talking on a 37-year-old landline.”
CVM: Nice!
Hornsby: “It’s a rarity, but we still retain one.”
CVM: It took a long time for us to give up ours. Congratulations on the release of your latest album. The title track of Indigo Park is a look back at a party at the Indigo Park Pool in Williamsburg when you were in 10th grade.
Hornsby: “It’s a look back, but it’s mostly about how you rethink these embarrassing, idiotic moments of your past. As you get older, you realize certain things. That’s what the chorus is about. So, ‘a look back’ is a bit facile. I only take umbrage with it because a lot of people say, ‘It’s Bruce looking back.’ In this case, it is a look back, but the reason for the looking back is the realization at a later age that it’s all bull—-.
CVM: (Laughs.)
Hornsby: (Laughs.) “Don’t stress about these old times where you made a slight bit of a fool of yourself. It doesn’t matter. It’s only life. Take it with a light strain.”
CVM: With time, you get perspective.
Hornsby: “Exactly.”
CVM: Can you just give me a little bit of the details of what happened at that party for it to stick in your mind?
Hornsby: “I was in private school in seventh, eighth, ninth grade….In 10th grade, I went back into the public school system in Williamsburg. And I was on the varsity [basketball team] in 10th grade, and I had this breakout game. And the papers made a big deal about it. And so, because of that, I was now accepted in the older crowd, the juniors and seniors—the quote-unquote ‘cool club.’ I got invited to all these things with the older crowd, which was fun for a 10th grade geek. One of these events was this pool party, which was celebrating the going-away of one of the vaunted young women in the school, who was moving to Hawaii. And so, I decided, well, OK, I’m going to go to this pool party. I’ll try to make a big splash. So, I knew this guy who had a ’41 Chevy, and I asked him to show me how to drive it….I dutifully learned how to drive a stick shift. I made my great, big entrance, and everyone just kind of yawned.”
CVM: You are mentioned prominently on the Indigo Park Pool website. Any plans to visit the pool again? I mean, I am guessing you’d get a better welcome this time.
Hornsby: “It wasn’t a brush-off by the pool people. It was just a brush-off by the older high school crowd. Will I go back to the Indigo Park Pool? I probably will.”
CVM: In the album, Bonnie Raitt is featured on the song Ecstatic. She thinks so much of you that she told The New York Times if she could only have one musician on a desert island, it would be you.
Hornsby: “Well, I paid her well for that statement.”
CVM: (Laughs.)
Hornsby: “She’s my big sister. I call her my big sister. She’s been a longtime supporter. We’re such close friends. We’ll get on the phone and just laugh together for an hour. It’s just a beautiful relationship for a really long time now.”
CVM: Ecstatic contains the line “Try to make the ecstatic last.” In what ways are you still chasing that feeling in life or looking to live that way? Or is that an observation about what you see other people doing?
Hornsby: “The song is about someone who is striving for something. There’s another line: ‘I’ve got a shot because of the work I’ve done.’ It’s just a song about someone who is experiencing something that’s so euphoric and hoping it will last. Simple as that.”
CVM: The album also features, unfortunately, your final collaboration with former Grateful Dead bandmate Bob Weir. What are your favorite memories of him?
Hornsby: “My favorite memories of Weir are mostly personal memories. He was a great person and ready for a laugh. Always a good time. I loved Weir. He was a beautiful guy and a deep soul.”
CVM: You perform with The Noisemakers in October at Christopher Newport University’s Ferguson Center for the Arts. Will you have an opening act?
Hornsby: “No way. This will be my third time playing the Ferguson Center but first time bringing the band there, so we’ll be the ball hogs there. (Laughs.) Just us.”
CVM: On this tour, will you play mostly new stuff, or will fans also get to hear all your greatest hits?
Hornsby: “It’s all over the map. We take requests from the audience, and we’ve been doing that since 1990. So, if you go to a show where there’s a sizable number of true fans who know about the request part of our show, you’ll see maybe 50 to 100 pieces of paper littering the stage as we go on. There’s never a set list….The way I’ve tried to play it now with the new record and the attention the new record’s gotten, I try to play four or five old hit songs for the softcore fans that sort of got off the train in 1990, you know. And then the rest of the concert, say, 10 to 15 more songs, have been—usually—from the subsequent era. But lately, it’s been a second fertile period for me. This is the fifth record I have released since 2019 of all-new material. So, for the last eight years of what I call my modern era—late-stage modern era—we probably play four to five newish songs, four or five hits, and four to five requests from the ’90s and 2000s era. Songs like Fortunate Son. Or even Spider Fingers. Or King of the Hill. Or Resting Place. You can just keep naming ’em. Talk of the Town. Harbor Lights. Walk in the Sun. Country Doctor. Many from that time and Halcyon Days. So, it’ll probably be like that. One-third really old, one-third middle period, one-third modern period.”
CVM: When I was a teen, a buddy sold me 25,000 baseball cards.
Hornsby: (Laughs.) “Wow!”
CVM: As a result, I spent many, many hours in my room, sorting baseball cards with the radio on. So much so, that to this day, when I hear certain songs, I reflexively say, “Baseball card song.” They are tunes I hold dear because they remind me of my youth. Mandolin Rain and The Way It Is are two of those. So, I just wanted to say thank you for two of my “baseball card songs.”
Hornsby: (Laughs.) “You’re very welcome. It’s rare that I don’t play The Way It Is. It’s achieved a status in the zeitgeist where I just feel it’s important to play it, and I like playing it. And people always say. ‘Oh, are you tired of it?’ There was a time where I was. But not now. And it’s all different with the Tupac version. And the Polo G version—the great Chicago rapper. Polo G’s version is just great. It’s called Wishing for a Hero. It features this beautiful gospel choir. So, yeah, it’s achieved a place in the culture, with no small thanks to all of the great hip-hop artists who have recorded it. So, yes, it’d be shocking if I don’t play [The Way It Is]. The only times I don’t play it is when the crowd’s so deeply involved and interested in what we’re doing that has nothing to do with old hits, that I don’t need it. Of course, when that happens, I always get a nasty letter or two.”
Butch Maier
