Bruce Hornsby Dives Deep With BrhyM

Bruce Hornsby’s résumé is so expansive that he could call up the Grateful Dead and Tupac Shakur for references.

Not that the acclaimed musician, who played over 100 live shows with the Dead and had his 1986 hit “The Way It Is” sampled on ’Pac’s “Changes,” needs any recommendations at this point. It’s just evidence that Hornsby can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, and has, over his fifty-year career. He's got three Grammys to prove it, too.

“I’m always looking to evolve and grow and change and improve in my musicianship and my writing and singing,” he says. “Everything about what I do, I’m looking to move into new places and looking for new inspiration, and that leads me fairly stylistically far afield.”

From his Virginia home, he casually mentions a modern French composer who might be more obscure to modern audiences but has inspired his work. “I’m an old music-school nerd, so I love everything from George Jones to Pierre Boulez,” he shares. “They have absolutely nothing in common, but they do for me, or I have something in common with them.”

Just like the Dead and 2Pac. So it’s not surprising that Hornsby recently teamed up with the New York City chamber ensemble yMusic to form BrhyM (pronounced “brim”) and release an aquatic album, Deep Sea Vents, on March 1. Hornsby, yMusic and BrhyM will be in Denver on Tuesday, April 23, at the Paramount Theatre.

Hornsby and the sextet first connected in 2016; they collaborated on Hornsby’s Absolute Zero record in 2019, along with some live encore songs for the ensuing tour. Deep Sea Vents took shape from a series of back-and-forths throughout the pandemic, during which Hornsby ultimately concocted the oceanic theme.

“They sent me this crazy fun, quasi-Dixieland track, and I wrote this crazy aquatic song called ‘Deep Sea Vents,’” he recalls. “It’s a total fantasy song about a misanthropic person — I guess myself — getting away and finding refuge in the deep-sea air currents that exist down there that might allow some sort of life.

“We had a great time playing it," he adds, "which made us want to do it more."
When Hornsby initially received what became the opening track, “The Wild Whaling Life,” he was reading Moby-Dick for the first time. “This one sounded like the sea,” he says, adding that Herman Melville's tome aligned with it perfectly.

“I hadn’t read it in my school days when it was probably assigned to me in eleventh-grade AP English class," he notes. "Well, most likely, I didn’t read it. In fact, I’m sure I didn’t read it. I got what was known as the Cliff Notes. I just bootlegged my way through it.”

But with Captain Ahab and Ishmael fresh in his psyche, Hornsby began to steer the theme into deeper waters. “This track sounded like the sonic version of Moby-Dick,” he explains. “It was serendipitous on a timing level, so I decided to write out of the book.”

There’s even a platypus appearance, in “Platypus Wow,” on the record. Hornsby points to those songs as evidence of Deep Sea Vent’s musical breadth. “They’re all completely different thematically, but with an obvious oceanic thread,” he says. “The first three together pointed the way to me, showed me the way, through to the end, so I decided to limit myself to write songs about the sea and the water and bathtubs.”

Unfortunately, his bathtub lyrics didn’t make the final cut.  But could you imagine what a Bruce Hornsby bathtub song would sound like? He doesn’t rule out writing one sometime in the future.

“That’s who I am as a musician and who I’ve always been,” he says of following the often unpredictable muse. “Hell, ‘Every Little Kiss’ starts off with a paraphrase from a Charles Ives piano sonata, the Concord Sonata. My first record [1986’s The Way It Is] was nodding to that.”

BrhyM also pays homage to Hornsby’s hits with a medley that was developed and refined live over the years since he and yMusic joined forces. “I’m always interested in spontaneity and creating the new in the moment,” Hornsby shares. “It’s been my self-appointed charge to find a connective tissue content-wise between the song ‘Platypus Wow,’ which is the wildest and weirdest song we play, to ‘The Way It Is,’ which is the most well known.”

Hornsby receives the backing he needs to achieve that through yMusic and its composer, Rob Moose, which bring a depth to the music that beefs it up even more. “They’re enjoying my flights of fancy between two incredibly stylistically disparate songs,” Hornsby says, adding that Moose has also rearranged some of his other popular songs for BrhyM.

“It’s finding a way to marry them, to wed them,” he concludes. “Denver will hear the fruits of my nightly spontaneous labor that I’m getting better at as I go. Well, you never know — at least I think I am.”

BrhyM, 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 23, Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Place. Tickets are $54-$129.