We are giving away a pair of tickets to Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers @ Revolution Hall on August 25. To win, comment below on this post why you’d like to attend. Winner will be drawn and emailed August 22.
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From our sponsors:
August 25, 2022
Doors 7PM, Show 8PM | $49.50 | 21+
More info: event.etix.com
Revolution Hall
1300 SE Stark St., Portland, OR
Based out of Williamsburg, VA, Hornsby first rose to national prominence with The Way It Is, his 1986 Grammy-winning debut album with The Range. The title track became the most-played song on American radio in 1987 while Tupac Shakur’s timeless song “Changes” builds on “The Way It Is” and set the stage for many subsequent versions of the track, including Polo G’s current single “Wishing For A Hero.” In 1991, Hornsby collaborated with Bonnie Raitt, playing on her iconic hit “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Additionally, Hornsby was a part-time member of the Grateful Dead from September 1990 to March 1992, performing over 100 concerts in America and Europe.
By mid-March 2020 Bruce Hornsby, in that now historical year, had completed a brief tour of five concerts. “Then all of a sudden, wham!” Hornsby remembers, “Everything shut down.” With “Non-Secure Connection” to release in summer, Hornsby began promoting the album. “So that was fine,” he says, following with an innocent refrain that would become spooky that pre-spring among active musicians globally: “But our tours got postponed or cancelled.”
“’Flicted,” the album Hornsby then began to create, marks the conclusion of what Hornsby calls a trilogy, inaugurated with the lauded “Absolute Zero” (2019,) in which the native and longtime resident of Williamsburg, Virginia intermingles his diverse musical passions, recording not exactly a self-invented genre but a world of vibrant sound and text all Hornsby’s own.
The twelve songs that comprise “’Flicted’ take their starting points from soundtrack scoring, the visuals-linked area of music composition with a distinguished history. Inexorably at home, Hornsby investigated again the “cues” he had written for the director Spike Lee, with whom Hornsby has worked since 1990. These abbreviated instrumental score passages had sparked song creation on his two previous albums.
“I was stuck in my house,” Hornsby says, “so I gathered up some cues I hadn’t used on ‘Absolute Zero’ and ‘Non-Secure Connection.” Additionally, he considered closely a riff he had asked a collaborator from ‘Absolute Zero’ – Blake Mills, a Los Angeles songwriter-producer and, as Hornsby describes him, “sprung-from-Zeus guitarist” – to record. “Blake gave me,” Hornsby says, “about a minute-and-a-half of this little thing.” For the final installment of his trilogy, Bruce Hornsby was off to the races.
And yet, the 2020 routes of the “’Flicted” songs were less determined by European and American 20th -century modern classical composition than by the fleet ear-bud zings and danceable grooves of 21st-century high-speed rail: This is a Bruce Hornsby album informed by the lucid atonal challenges and serialist dissonant flows of its two predecessors but significantly more pop. Produced by Tony Berg, who adds his sense of 1960s Los Angeles studio rock to the mix, and Hornsby, the broad impression “’Flicted” builds is not divorced from the formally advanced “electric pop” of, say, a heavily streamed Taylor Swift-Zayn Malik duet. This is bold.