Bruce Hornsby: Cinematic Cues

After a chance introduction by Branford Marsalis in the early ’90s, director Spike Lee and Bruce Hornsby’s initial connection and collaboration on music videos sparked a creative partnership spanning three decades. Hornsby has scored music for several of Lee’s films, including the song “Love Me Still” with Chaka Khan for Lee’s 1995 film Clockers, through more present-day projects, including the 2009 Kobe Bryant documentary Kobe Doin’ Work, the 2018 drama BlacKkKlansman, and the Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It, based on Lee’s 1986 debut film. Revisiting some of his composed cues, Hornsby began crafting songs from the abbreviated passages, releasing Absolute Zero in 2019, the 2020 follow-up Non-Secure Connection, and the newly released final installation ‘Flicted. 

“I had amassed all this music that I’d written for him for over an 11- to 12-year period, and a lot of them sounded like they wanted to be turned into songs,” says Hornsby of his work with Lee. “This is the third and last because I feel like I’ve mined that area enough. My next record will be completely different, with chamber music.”  

Tapping into some of the scores he composed, ‘Flicted is the most experimental capture of Hornsby’s trilogy of compositions. Fused around folk, hip-hop, synth, and R&B, ‘Flicted mirrors certain unsettled societal states of hysterics and other afflictions, some surfacing around the pandemic.  

Although ‘Flicted is a little less harmonically adventurous than Non-Secure Connection, according to Hornsby, it’s one that’s more accessible. “They’re all informed for the most part by the films,” he says. “The genesis, the origin story for most of the songs, comes from the film cues that I wrote. As far as sonics, I would describe this more on a sequencing level, because frankly, this is a little disparate stylistically so I decided to have little sections.” 

Walking through the 12 tracks, Hornsby says the first two—“Sidelines” and “Tag”— are based around “guitar indie-pop,” while “The Hound” is more modern minimalist chamber music with some blues elements, featuring members of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra.  

“The next three —‘Too Much Monkey Business,’ ‘Maybe Now,’ and ‘Bucket List’—are much more groove-oriented,” adds Hornsby, calling the latter two more EDM blues.  “Those three songs I call a palate cleanser, a breath, so ‘Days Ahead’ falls in the perfect spot.”  

The second half of ‘Flicted gets the dulcimer treatment on “Lidar” and “Is This It.” 

“Then it just moves on from that to other areas that are not necessarily stylistically related, which constitutes the last three songs,” adds Hornsby, cueing the more experimental springs of “Had Enough,” the piano-led “Simple Prayer II,” featuring singers Z Berg and Ethan Gruska and a follow up to the first “Simple Prayer” (featured on Levitate in 2009), and the bigger band close of “Point Omega,” a track Hornsby originally wrote for Absolute Zero, featuring Jack DeJohnette playing with a string orchestra. 

“This song felt like the fitting final piece to close the trilogy, bookending with its spiritual and textural cousin, the first song on the first record,” says Hornsby. “It’s a rumination on string theory, theology, ornithology, and the invisible forces that rule our existence.” 

Co-produced by Hornsby and  longtime collaborator Tony Berg, ‘Flicted features a collection of hand-picked artists, including a duet with Haim’s Danielle Haim on the slower waltz of “Days Ahead.” 

“When Tony [Berg] heard the song, he instantly heard it as Brian Wilson-esque,” says Hornsby. “Tony was an apprentice for producer Jack Nitzsche in the 1960s. He had fun ideas for this, and I love all the production flourishes, the ’60s Wrecking Crew pop aesthetic.” 

Vampire Weekend’s  Ezra Koenig  and  longtime collaborator and guitarist Blake Mills  join on opening “Sidelines,” a song Hornsby says gave him chills when Koenig first  started singing it. “I thought it had something unique,” says Hornsby, “so I asked Ezra to be a part of it because I liked the way he was singing the choruses.” 

Co-written by Mills and co-produced by Ariel Rechtshaid, “Sidelines,” along with “Tag,” are the two songs Hornsby says were most reflective of life during the pandemic. The former track shape-shifts around the Salem witch trial of the 1600s and takes cues from the dystopian setting inspired by Don DeLillo’s book Underworld, where the road signs transform into a driver’s reality, continuing on through the present-day hysteria around the virus—Open up hysteria / Fear at a fever pitch / Fever streets walk don’t walk / Crowded sky of ventilators /Antennas out, under the moving sky.  

“Tag,” meanwhile, subtly connects to the game of playing tag and the flip side of not touching. “It’s fun and games and pestilence,” says Hornsby. “This record does relate to our time now. I’m hopefully trying to do it in an artful manner and I may fail, but that’s my goal.” 

Even the album title relates to these stranger times when “the world is basically, well, ‘flicted,’” says Hornsby. 

“Too Much Monkey Business,” written and recorded by Chuck Berry in 1956, is the first cover Hornsby has featured on an album and one he wanted to refresh from an initial arrangement he recorded with Leon Russell years earlier. The sci-fi-fixed “Lidar” taps into more roots, peering into the light detection technology used to target objects. “It allows people to look deep down through depths, even under the ground,” explains Hornsby. “They may find old settlements, relics, or ruins. It can also be analogous to digging down deep through the brush to find out what went wrong in your relationship—uncovering hidden clues about what we didn’t do right.” 

Listening through ‘Flicted, says Hornsby, there’s a new sound discovered in every listen. “Some of my favorite songs I’ve written over the years are the simplest songs I’ve written, but I also like complexity,” he says. “I like harmonic complexity in chord structures and dissonance, and I like to use all the notes, not just the white ones. I’m a black note guy. Most people in pop music, and most people who listen to pop music, live a white note, diatonic life.” 

He adds, “Some of my favorite songs of all time are white note music, but I’m just drawn to the complex as well, much to the chagrin of a lot of my audience that really wishes that I would not go down the chromatic path, but I’m not making my music for them.” 

Working with Berg, who Hornsby has known since he formed Bruce Hornsby and the Range in 1984, was a natural state for ‘Flicted. “We were playing around L.A. and making a little noise,” says Hornsby, who was playing mostly hammer dulcimer and accordion and fronting the band in the ’80s. Berg, an earlier session guitarist who appeared on The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack and several The Muppet Show albums, was a man about town, says Hornsby, a great musician and session player who went on to produce Aimee Mann, Public Image Ltd, and Edie Brickell, among others. 

“Tony started coming to our gigs and insinuating himself into our world,” says Hornsby. “He was very interested in what I was doing. We got some demo money from Epic Records, and he was in the studio with us hanging out, becoming my friend.” 

Remaining friends to date, Berg even played on Hornsby’s fourth album Harbor Lights in 1993 and co-produced Levitate in 2009. It was the latter album where Hornsby first connected with the then-18-year-old Mills, who is also featured on ‘Flicted. 

“We have a similar aesthetic sense,” says Hornsby of Berg. “We’re good enough friends that when we disagree, we just laugh about it. That’s a very important point because disagreement in collaboration can lead to no collaboration.” 

Hornsby adds, “It’s personal, and it means a lot to whoever’s bringing something to the collaborative table. Then when someone says, ‘I’m just not feeling this thing you like,’ that’s hard. It’s an ego blast, a smack to the psyche, so it’s very important to be able to keep a light strain about all this, which Tony and I do.”  

Now getting to work on a collaboration in chamber music, Hornsby says he’s ready to  “rampage” the performing arts world. More than 35 years since Hornsby’s debut, The Way It Is, his journey has been fulfilling, but it’s far from over. 

“I’ve had so many collaborations in my 36 years and with amazing, notable people who I loved in childhood, so my career has been gratifying in that way,” shares Hornsby, highlighting two projects, in particular, that stand out: contributing to former The Band member Robbie Robertson’s second solo album Storyville in 1991, and working with singer and multi-instrumentalist Justin Vernon, the frontman of Bon Iver. Most recently, Vernon contributed to Hornsby’s Absolute Zero tracks “Cast-Off” and “Meds” and added some production work on Non-Secure Connection. In 2019, Hornsby returned the favor, co-writing “U (Man Like)” for Vernon’s latest Bon Iver album I, I. 

After writing about 240 pieces of music for Lee over a 12-year period for multiple films, Hornsby says working with Vernon and younger artists like Haim has given him a sense of a late-career renaissance. “I had amassed all this content, all this music, and these collaborations have brought me to this point,” says Hornsby. “I’m so fortunate and grateful to the men and women who have been involved with me on this trilogy. It’s a journey I wasn’t expecting to take with unexpected circumstances.” 

In his revival, Hornsby’s creative circle has turned. “When I was younger, I was being reached out to by heroes of mine who are probably 20 or 25 years older than I am now,” says Hornsby. “Now that I’m the older one, the elder musician, I’m getting reached out to by people who are 25 and 30 years younger than me. It’s full circle in the most beautiful way.” 

Photos by Tristan Williams