Bruce Hornsby was ready for a well-deserved songwriting break. But, as is often the case, the muse had other plans.
“At that point, I was kind of fried with all this. I’d written 40-some songs in four years. And that’s a lot for me. But then this one idea popped into my head, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone,” Hornsby says with an audible, self-effacing chuckle, still clearly amused by the situation several years later. “It would wake me up in the middle of the night. It’d be in my head, and I was trying to give it the Heisman, the stiff arm, but it wasn’t working. Finally, after about six-eight months of trying not to deal with this idea, I finally said, ‘OK, I yield to you. I’ll give in and take the deep dive.’ So I wrote it, and then I recorded it.”