The Core: Bruce Hornsby and yMusic Present BrhyM
Bruce Hornsby partners with the chamber ensemble yMusic BRHYM for a new, cross-genre collaboration, Deep Sea Vents.
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Starting From Absolute Zero
Bruce Hornsby: In 2015, Justin Vernon reached out to me to do a duet with him. The indie-rock world was making a Grateful Dead tribute [2016’s Day of the Dead], and he had always liked my version of the Garcia-Hunter song “Black Muddy River.” I already knew that he was a fan—I was getting Google alerts about Bon Iver interviews that mentioned me.
I was playing a solo concert in Iowa, which was pretty close geographically to Justin’s place in Eau Claire, Wis., so I drove my rental car up there and spent two days working with those guys and had a great time doing that. And then the next year, he asked me to be a part of this amazing festival that they ran for a few years, the Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival. Playing before us was The Staves—this beautiful British female folk trio—and yMusic. I was floored by what I heard. I had a little festival that I was doing in Williamsburg, Va., the Funhouse Fest, so I asked yMusic and The Staves to come and play. That’s where I met yMusic personally—before that, I had just heard them and noted how beautiful they sounded—and said, “I’ve got this record that I’ve started to make, and I’d love to have you guys play on it and The Staves sing on it.” That was my 2019 record, Absolute Zero, and it just went from there.
Rob Moose—one of the de facto leaders of this leaderless group—also did some string arrangements on a few other songs for Absolute Zero, and they kept working for me on my next record, Non-Secure Connection. In 2019, we did two nights with yMusic and my band at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, and then yMusic reached out to me and asked if I’d like to do a mini tour in February and March of 2020. They would play a half-hour set, I would play a half-hour solo piano set and then we would come together for an hour-plus collaborative set, which would feature four of my “Moose Hits”—my hit songs featuring Rob’s arrangement— interspersed with songs that they had worked on with me. We got about five shows in and then COVID hit.
Nadia Sirota: Eaux Claires was a pretty special place in terms of artists getting an opportunity to cross-pollinate in a very elevated but low-ego environment. We ended up collaborating with The Staves and Paul Simon as a result of Eaux Claires. Justin organized that festival with Aaron Dessner of The National and both Justin and The National are deep in yMusic’s DNA—our origin myth actually goes back to a National show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008. Rob and C.J. Camerieri, our trumpet player, were both playing with them, but they were on opposite sides of the stage. I was in the audience and then, at the afterparty, the three of us ran into each other at the bar. I knew Rob from summer camp and C.J. from Juilliard. We started talking about the fact that all of us were working in classical music, but we were also working with bands who were experimenting with orchestral textures, like The National were at that point. So at that afterparty, yMusic was born.
Deep Sea Vents
BH: In December ‘19, Rob reached out to me and asked me if I would have any interest in writing a song with yMusic to play as an encore on our upcoming five[1]concert run, and I said, “Sure, send me a track.” They did and I wrote “Deep Sea Vents”—an aquatic-themed song written out of something I read in a newspaper. And the next fall, when everything was shut down, Rob and I were talking about some current music we were making and he said, “How about we continue with this? None of us can go anywhere.”
They would send me tracks over the next year and a half. It’s an aquatic-themed album. Every song is coming from the world of oceans, the world of water. That ties the whole thing together. Early on, they sent me this track that gave me an oceanic feel. And I happened to be, for the first time, reading Melville’s Moby Dick. So I was inspired that the music and my reading material matched. And that’s the origin story for this upcoming album, Deep Sea Vents. I would write lyrics over their music, sing on it and send it back to them. There was one song, “Deep Blue,” that I started, but mostly I would work from what they sent me. I would move things around and create different spaces—muting this instrument here and adding this there.
Rob Moose: Around that run of shows with Bruce, we had started the process of group composition for the first time after being an ensemble for 12 years—commissioning music and collaborating with artists. We had finally put ourselves in a position where we really wanted to try to create material from scratch together, so it was great timing. I was really struck by the combination of our creative ideas and wanted to explore it further. We just decided to keep going with that process. Over the next year or two, we made two albums—one became our self-titled album— and anything that felt like it wanted to invite a singer into the room we would send to Bruce. With everything we sent him, he would come back really quickly with a fully fleshed[1]out song. In some cases, it was just him singing over what we had sent. Other times he was playing piano or dulcimer. Even if they were more classical, film[1]scory or amorphous, he just found a form through them and surprised us as much as we surprised him. It was just an incredible gift to get those songs back.
I was also interested in pushing this Americana consonance, this 1% poppiness. I grew up listening to some of his early records. My parents had his music, and I knew that he had this gift of melody and the ability to get to the heart of things and write in this touching way.
Under the Trojan horse of the complexity of our ensemble on paper, I hoped that we could get away with choruses that would take us back to where my familiarity with his music began.
NS: Even though we’re extremely opinionated people, we had never thrown our hats into the compositional songwriting ring prior to these projects. But we didn’t end up in the studio together due to the pandemic. That was its own unique set of challenges, but it enabled us to do some very different thinking and go further out in many ways. I would be fascinated to take this project into the studio someday and see what we do differently.
Finding a New Sound
BH: [Our tour as BrhyM] will follow a similar order of events to our 2020 run. yMusic will play a little bit, I’ll play a little bit and then we’ll come together to play the Deep Sea Vents album, with several of these Moose arrangements of my older songs interspersed throughout.
Also of interest to the Relix world, Branford Marsalis has a beautiful solo on the Deep Sea Vents song “Phase Change” and he plays on “Platypus Wow.” And my drummer Chad Wright plays drums on the one drum track. Branford was playing in Norfolk, Va., which is 40 minutes away from me, with the Virginia Symphony. He came to my house on a day off and I played him some of what we were working on and he was pretty knocked out.
RM: I would get calls and texts from Bruce about what different people thought, including Branford, who loved the music so much that he asked if he could play on it. Our group has an odd instrumentation and it was designed that way because we really wanted specific people to be in it. It doesn’t have a bass, it doesn’t have percussion in a traditional sense, but it can function orchestrally, it can function like a chamber ensemble, it can function like a band. So I pushed hard for the idea of us touring with just Bruce for this BrhyM run. It was fun to collaborate with his band and get to ride the incredible wave of what they can do improvisationally. We experienced the sheer breadth of their knowledge of his catalog. But I thought, “If we’re going to do this, let’s make it feel slightly uncomfortable, difficult and challenging. Let’s find a new sound.” Throughout his career, he’s put himself in unpredictable configurations and continued to push his writing and performing voice forward. So I was thrilled that that appealed to him.
Trail Mix
BH: The songs on Spirit Trail [Hornsby’s 1998 album, which was recently reissued for its 25th anniversary] form the core of my live repertoire. It’s a double album—17 songs and three instrumentals—and it’s always held up. Those songs became some of the most requested songs of our concerts. We’ve been taking requests at our concerts since 1990—it’s never changed, never abated. Our stages have been littered with paper since we’ve been out there and that’s great. Some are art pieces. People use their requests as license to create their own drawings— some are very comedic, some are very soulful.
We sample Garcia on “Sunflower Cat.” The producer of the second CD of Spirit Trail, Mike Mangini, was more of a hip-hop producer and didn’t get the Grateful Dead thing. I played him a couple of things and he was OK with them, and then I played him “China Cat Sunflower,” and he went, “That, I love. Let’s sample it.” Garcia had played on my past three records, so I loved the idea of sampling him, since this was ‘97 and he was gone by that point.
The songs on that record have aged well and evolved. For this 25th anniversary album, there is an extra CD called “Live Trail,” featuring recent live versions of the songs on the record to show how they have grown and evolved, sometimes erratically. We also found four songs that were slated for the follow-up to Spirit Trail that were never released, so we released them as part of the box set, “Lost and Found on the Spirit Trail.” The great Bob Ludwig remastered the record to great effect.
Over the years, various people in the bluegrass world have covered songs off Spirit Trail, notably the great band Greensky Bluegrass. They regularly play two songs, “King of the Hill” and “Great Divide.” Jason Carter, Del McCoury’s fiddle player, also recorded “King of the Hill” and Chris Thile is a fan. In 2001, I was playing at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Nickel Creek was on the bill. I’m backstage walking around and this 21-year-old comes flying up to me and introduces himself, with great enthusiasm, saying, “Your Spirit Trail record is our bus CD. I have transcribed every song from it.”
Several years later, we were playing Wolf Trap and he was opening for us and I went on the bus and said, “Chris, tonight’s the night. Come up with us and we’re just gonna play Spirit Trail songs all night.” Sparks flew—it was just a transcendent gig. We did a duo version of “Resting Place” that’s very free-feeling and spontaneous. It was just two geeks having at it together.
Half-Vague Names
BH: The Noisemakers as a name is half vague, but it came about because, after the live record Here Come the Noise Makers, people just started referring to the band as The Noisemakers. We had no band name, so I just said, “OK, we’ll just call it that.” But the origin story of why we called the album that is quite humorous. It peels back to our late-‘70s band days. We played The Cave in Virginia Beach, right near the ocean, and it was an old biker bar. We were coming straight out of University of Miami Jazz School and any pop music we were playing was coming from the Steely Dan/ Michael McDonald era of music.
We were the band known to play a great replication of Steely Dan’s “Aja,” which was not easy. I was just starting to write my own songs then—we would come in and rehearse in the afternoon and there was a group of happy[1]hour denizens in there who were, frankly, not really fans of our band. They were more into Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, Marshall Tucker Band and Southern rock, and we were playing Larry Carlton, Bill Evans and Dead tunes. We were the soundtrack to a fight one night—a bartender was beating the shit out of a cook because he didn’t like the way the guy made his steak while we were in the middle of playing “Big Railroad Blues.”
We were coming in there two or three times a week and there was this one guy named Donny who was always there at the bar. I don’t think he was too into what we were doing. So, when we would come in, he would jovially but derisively cry, “Here come the noise makers.” That became a watchword for us, and we would just say that with some good ol’ Southern twang. So when it came time to name our record that came out in 2001, I just thought that was a good name.
Why I Came Here
BH: I’ve stopped playing Dead songs recently because I felt like that’s not why I came here. I came to express my journey and make that the focus. I’ve loved my time with the Dead— I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I love the people, love their approach to playing, love their songs and the great body of work that they’ve amassed as writers. But I just felt that if people were there to hear our version of “Jack Straw,” I had to stop doing that. The Grateful Dead world is very passionate about their music—the Grateful Dead songs are the hymns of the deep Dead fans’ lives. The songs are so deep, but I felt that it was time for me to take a stand and go, “I’ve had a long career and taken it to very different stylistic places, especially these last 5-6 years. I want my concerts to reflect that journey and my stylistic evolution more than playing a Dead song or a Dylan song.”
Justin Vernon reaching out to me to work with him on various events or projects was a watershed event. Justin opened a door and I walked through that door, only to find that there were a whole lot more people in that room—meaning the indie[1]rock room—who felt the same way about me as he did. And so I started working with all these other people—Jamila Woods, James Mercer, Ezra Koenig, Danielle Haim, on and on. There were all these moments over a five-year period: I played a wedding with Justin and his longtime bandmates in Raleigh, N.C., in 2019 and I played Coachella with them. I even played a motel in Eau Claire with those guys.
I’m not saying I’ll never play the Dead again—again, I love the music—but it’s been a really great second period for me. I’ve made records in 2019, 2020, 2022 and now 2024. So there’s a lot to say there. There’s a lot to deal with and that’s also a big part of why I’m not playing too many covers these days. The covers I’m playing now are more like modern classical covers. Of course, now and then, something off-the-cuff will happen—I went into Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” a couple of months ago—because I’m trying to keep the spontaneity level high. So if I hear something in my head or something that I play reminds me of another song, I’ll go into it and my band will just follow me. It is really fun, creative and spontaneous.
RM: We are planning to play the majority of the new album live and that’s going to be really interesting to figure out because we never have done it. We’ve never played most of this music together because even the instrumental parts were completely composed in isolation. Like in the past, hopefully, we will be able to rotate in some of his ‘80s and ‘90s hits and revisit some of the stuff from Absolute Zero. Maybe we can convince him to do a Dead cover. The first time we ever played together was at his festival, and we played “Loser,” which is one that I really love. I did a quick arrangement backstage for the group, so maybe we’ll be able to sprinkle in some things like that. Knowing him, it’s going to vary a lot, and we’ll have to learn a lot of material. I hope we can keep up.
