Hello, My Name Is Bruce
Hello, My Name Is Bruce
IE: Are things new and exciting for you? Or are you just Bruce? Day-in and out, you’re Bruce.
Bruce Hornsby: I just did this bluegrass album with Ricky Skaggs and I got this jazz record with Jack DeJohnette and Christian McBride and I got this box set coming out. I’d say there’s a lot new and exciting. Places I’ve never been. I mean I’ve been there, but never in this intense a fashion.
IE: The record company made you go as Bruce Hornsby & The Range.
BH: We were just called The Range. I was hiding behind the name, but they wanted it to just be Bruce Hornsby — I had them compromise on the unwieldy moniker. In the end, what got me signed to RCA, what they were most excited about, was this tape that I’d made just with me and a drum machine — a solo tape that had no band on it, and those were all the songs that became the “hits.” That was a total fluke; no one thought our record was gonna be commercial. We weren’t signed because they thought it was commercial at all.
IE: Even though you’ve been “Bruce Hornsby” publicly for 20 years now, not a band member, you still say “we.”
BH: Right, yeah. I say “we” in cases where I wrote songs with my brother. Maybe I’m saying “we” as some false humility angle.
IE: How’s it feel to be anthologized? Is it like, “Wow. Boy. That’s 20 years”?
BH: It’s just a feeling of pride, frankly. What to me is special about this is I feel my music has grown — and I probably would have said “our” music but you’ve got me thinking, so I’ll take full blame for it — I feel like my music has grown a lot through the years and evolved. The mass of America knows me for six hits from 1986 to 1990, plus maybe they know me as the guy who wrote “End Of The Innocence.” Or maybe in the ‘hood they would know me as the guy who wrote “Changes” by Tupac Shakur. And that’s great. I’m proud of all these differing things, these different areas. I like the fact it’s all in one place now.
RCA/Legacy released a four-disc set, Bruce Hornsby: Intersections 1985-2005, in late July.
— Steve Forstneger
