Photo: David McClister

Continuing a prolific hot streak that includes turning out over 40 songs in just four years, Bruce Hornsby returns with another set of inspired originals—backed by a cross-generational cast of collaborators.

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.”

As he is tracking the unexpected origins of “Indigo Park”—the title-track of the new, 10-song studio set he’s scheduled to release on April 3 via Zappo Productions/Thirty Tigers—Hornsby is sitting in a hotel room in Houston, before a solo set at The Heights Theater, and then he’s off to a college town about an hour away. The Virginia-based musician is quick to mention at the top of his Zoom interview that, despite over four decades on the road, he’s never played this particular venue before. And that desire to experience fresh musical situations has continued to guide the pianist through an unexpected latter-career renaissance that’s led to the release of four albums in five years—2019’s Absolute Zero, 2020’s Non-Secure Connection, 2022’s ’Flicted and 2024’s Deep Sea Vents—a prolific second act scoring films and his own version of a Never Ending Tour with his veteran band, the Noisemakers. In that time, he’s also naturally aged into a gracious elder stateman, collaborating with improv-forward favorites like Goose and Eggy on stage and working closely with a new generation of indie-rock icons in the studio.

“Spending time with Bruce and his band was the complete opposite of the phrase ‘never meet your heroes,’” Eggy guitarist Jake Brownstein says. “We felt an immediate kinship with them. They were unbelievably generous with their time and their spirit, both on stage and off. There is a magical energy that lives inside that music and inside that band. Bruce created an environment where we felt completely welcome. He would always encourage us to jump in and hang out on the songs, even if we did not know every detail yet. He trusted that the music was already in our hearts and that we would find our place within it. That level of openness and musical trust is something I will always carry with me.”

Like most of the albums Hornsby has dropped during the past decade, Indigo Park nods to the varied interests he’s touched on in recent years while still feeling sonically cohesive, a cross-generational offering that weaves in appearances by Bob Weir, Bonnie Raitt and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koening, as well as guitarist Blake Mills, bassist Pino Palladino, drummer Chris Dave and members of the Noisemakers. Written on the eve of Hornsby’s 70th birthday, Indigo Park, which he produced with Tony Bergand and Will Maclellan, is also one of his most lyrically reflective song cycles in some time—a lookback on his singular journey from Williamsburg, Va. to stages around the world.

“You could call it ‘Bruce’s Aging Record.’ It’s more of a first-person record,” he says with a laugh, before recounting the party at Williamsburg’s Indigo Park Pool that inspired the album’s namesake song. “It was about a clownish move that I tried to make when I was in 10th grade, to make a big splash at a party to which I was invited that featured almost an exclusively older crowd. I guess I was sort of brought into the cool club.”

Once he decided to push off his songwriting sabbatical, and his nascent ideas really started to germinate, Hornby’s next step was to shop his new number to a few friends to see if he’d stuck the landing.

However, Hornsby is quick to note that he didn’t start out with a complete blank slate when he realized that he needed at least another nine tracks to put together a proper LP.

“I had one and a half Robert Hunter songs—Hunter/Hornsby songs—that were sitting there,” he says proudly. “He reached out in 2008 and asked me if I’d be interested in writing a song with him. And, of course, I said, ‘Yes!’ To me, he’s one of the greats, a transcendent writer.”

It’s no secret, at this point, that Hornsby grew up on the Dead’s music, taking inspiration from their storied song catalog perhaps even more than their improvisational approach. He connected with Hunter through his years in the Dead’s orbit, and they ended up working on five originals together before Hunter passed away in 2019, beginning with “Cyclone,” which appears on the 2009 record Levitate. Hornsby describes the tune as one of the Noisemakers’ “main songs,” a “fan favorite” and a “band favorite,” kicking off a fruitful relationship that led to “Tropical Cashmere Sweater” on 2016’s Rehab Reunion and “I’ll Take You There (Misty)” on Absolute Zero.

“He said, ‘Can you send me some music, and I’ll see if it resonates?’” Hornsby says of the initial conversation that birthed “Cyclone.” “So I found some old cassettes, some song ideas that were never fully realized, and I found this one that felt like it could be a classic Dead song, sort of a ‘Loser’-esque song, and I sent it to him. And two weeks later, I got an email back with these lyrics that were syllabically and metrically aligned with the sort of guide vocal I’d given him, along with the piano. And it was just an amazing thing. It was truly Hunter. It had the playing cards. And he quite liked it as well. I sent it back to him, and he was very fond of it. So he sent me another one, a crazier song, ‘It Might As Well Be Me (Florinda).’”

Hornsby included “It Might As Well Be Me (Florinda)” on a live record that compiled solo performances from 2012 and 2013 but felt that he never fully completed the number and did another pass while working on Indigo Park. Not only did the tune make the final cut but he also recruited Weir to sing on and contribute guitar to the track. Hornsby pitched Weir on the idea in late 2024 when they crossed paths at Life Is a Carnival, a musical celebration of their mutual running buddy Robbie Robertson. Weir agreed to participate and immediately nailed his vocals. It turned out to be their final collaboration, closing a circle that included memorable nights on stage together with the Grateful Dead, The Other Ones, the ensemble for Nancy Pelosi’s Speaker of the House swearing-in ceremony and the Fare Thee Well band, in addition to several different duo and trio appearances and joint tours with their respective outfits.

“At this point, it turns out to possibly be one of his last recordings,” Hornsby says. “He just loved to play.”

While working toward Indigo Park, Hornsby also decided to finish another partially baked Hunter collaboration, “Alabama.” During the rollout for Indigo Park, Hornsby highlighted the song’s “predilection for worlds-in-collision smashups.” Working from there, he built out the piece with a collage of loops and an interpolation of Ligeti’s etude “L’Escalier Du Diable,” tucking his first recorded piano solo into the “tricky, stretchy music” for good measure.

“[Hunter] sent me this crazy song and his email, accompanying the lyric, was sort of apologetic,” Hornsby says. “It was like, ‘I don’t know about this one. It might be nothing. It might be just too wild and crazy, but, hey, I’m sending it to you, and do with it what you want. Nothing is fine, too.’ So I started fooling around with it, but then I put it on the shelf. I didn’t really like what I was coming up with for it. But, finally, I dealt with it, using some very chromatic, 12-tone-esque harmonic content, inspired specifically by the Schoenberg Suite for Piano, which was his first dodecaphonic, 12-tone writing—a 12-tone piece.”

Noting Hunter’s prolific streak toward the end of his life, Hornsby causally mentions the wealth of material the Grateful Dead scribe crafted with Jim Lauderdale, which may actually add up to even more music than he wrote with Garcia. And he’s proud to be part of Hunter’s creative storyline.

“I had my five,” Hornsby says. “And I will cherish them forever.”

While the two Hunter/Hornsby cuts and Weir’s appearance nod to a specific era of Hornsby’s career, others circle back to his varied interests. “North Dakota Slate Roof,” one of the two dulcimer songs on Indigo Park, finds the middle ground between Irish folk singer Paul Brady and minimalist composer Philip Glass.

“Welcome Here, Kind Stranger, Paul Brady’s record of Irish music, is a transcendent piece of music,” Hornsby says. “I was fooling around with something that was very Brady-esque on the dulcimer, and it led me to write the song. It’s a great, old-time folky song, but with a couple of twists as well.”

Throughout Indigo Park, his 26th album, Hornsby also places a particular emphasis on the Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, utilizing the instrument on five different songs.

“You could call this record my Roger McGuinn record,” Hornsby says, looping back to “Indigo Park.” “In a serious way, the chorus jumps with these 12 strings, doubled to the same part played again for a sort of fatness-of-sound feeling.”

At various points, Hornsby’s memories swing from his childhood to parenthood. “Take a Light Strain” retells a vivid dream he had about his father visiting him from the great beyond, while “Ecstatic,” which digs into “the physiological sensations that often accompany a peak experience,” recounts a story from Hornsby’s days watching his son on the court.

“It’s a song that was inspired by my old role as an AAU basketball parent,” he says. “He was a hotshot [player], and we were there in the stands with our great fellow parents, and they had some of the greatest chants: ‘You fouled, you did it, raise your hand and admit it’ and ‘That’s right, you walked, you traveled and got caught.’ I loved them, and I always I said to myself that, at some point, I’d love to put those chants into a song.”

Hornsby’s longtime friend Bonnie Raitt lends her services to “Ecstatic” as well. But, despite considering Raitt to be his “big sister in music,” and noting their shared sense of humor, Hornsby says her participation in the project wasn’t necessarily a layup.

“Look, she’s very selective, even with me,” Hornsby says. “She gets hit up so much to do this stuff, so she said to me, ‘I don’t want to spread myself too thin, but send it to me.’ So I sent it to her, and she instantly called back and said, ‘Oh, hell yeah. We gotta do this.’ She was pretty quick about it, too, as busy as she is. She recorded up in Marin, where she lives, and she did a fantastic job. I didn’t see her record it, but she was calling me about every half an hour while she was recording and saying, ‘OK, what about this? What do I do here?’ She was very dutiful about that. Then she sent it to us, and we had no changes to make. We can make each other laugh for hours.”

Raitt, who used Hornsby on her classic track “I Can’t Make You Love Me” 35 years ago, adds: “I’ve loved working with Bruce and being friends all these years. There’s something about his range and depth that touches me so deeply, his ability to meld his deep taproot of Appalachia, gospel, jazz and the funkiest R&B all into his own totally unique style. I admire how, after all these decades, he’s still pushing boundaries, digging deep and stretching.”

Yet, perhaps Indigo Park’s most reflective song is its fourth track, “Silhouette Shadows,” which recounts the response Hornsby’s third-grade class had to John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. “The lyrics go like this: ‘In third grade waiting for the intercom to tell us when the buses arrive/ On a Friday afternoon, November 22/ Interrupted by a TV voice telling us the President’s been shot/ Then kids erupted in glee/ Shouting ‘Hooray, Nixon can take over’/ Ms. Nimmo jumped their ass and tore ‘em down/ I was really alarmed and confused/ Watching the children parroting parent’s views,” he says, singing the tune’s words over Zoom. “That’s a very strange memory, but you’ll never forget that and that’s Exhibit A for my ruminative, reflective moments on this record.”

During another verse of “Silhouette Shadows,” he thinks back to his days at Berkeley College of Music, when a chance encounter led to his first taste of the darker side of the music world.

“I was practicing, and all of a sudden, I could tell there was a young student hanging around the practice room because there were windows there that you could see through,” he says. “Hank kept hanging around and, finally, he knocked, came in and started talking to me, asking me questions about what I was doing. He worked for a well-known R&B producer, Dave Crawford, in Atlanta. This is 1974. Long story short, he got me to come down there to meet this guy and make a record with this man. But it went south really fast. It was a serious drug scene, and I wasn’t into that, and they were trying to push the blow on me. The line in the song goes, “I flew down there to hang in their scene/ Tried to get me to do blow and, and much more/ I wouldn’t do it/ Instant ostracism/ Left in two days, don’t know what I learned from that/ Maybe nothing.”

Hornsby’s current, incredibly prolific period can be traced back to the convergence of two disparate elements: his work with Brooklyn, N.Y. filmmaker Spike Lee and his introduction to Justin Vernon, the Wisconsin-bred musician who performs as Bon Iver.

“They sent me into this creative space in about 2018,” Hornsby says, describing the period that preceded his recent 40-songs-in-four-years feat. “I’ve written about 240 pieces of music for Spike for about six different films. So I had all this music, and some of these film cues felt like they wanted to be expanded into songs with words. So, hence, the cinematic quality of a lot of these albums, at least Absolute Zero and Non-Secure Connection, because these were musical pieces I’d written for Spike Lee films.”

Around the same time, Hornsby also started working in a variety of capacities with Vernon, who came of age listening to the piano player’s albums and started name-dropping him in interviews. In particular, the Bon Iver founder, who had an affinity for jambands growing up, was a fan of the musician’s arrangement of the Grateful Dead’s “Black Muddy River” on the live release Here Come the Noise Makers, a record that served as a gateway to both his and the Dead’s music for a specific generation of listeners. When The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner asked Vernon to take part in their 2016 tribute record Day of the Dead, Vernon invited Hornsby to join in the sessions, which also reunited his teenage band DeYarmond Edison. Hornsby traveled to Vernon’s Wisconsin studio to jam with the ensemble, including Brad Cook, the producer who has since gone on to work closely with acts like Waxahatchee, MJ Lenderman, Kevin Morby and many others. They immediately clicked, and Vernon and Hornsby began batting around musical ideas and appearing together at various concerts, ranging from the wedding of noted Raleigh chef Ashley Christensen and Kaitlyn Goalen to the vaunted fields of Coachella.

“I was probably the oldest person on any stage at Coachella, which is what you want, which was fantastic,” Hornsby says. “[Vernon] helped me with Absolute Zero and Non-Secure Connection, and we wrote a song together for Absolute Zero. The reaction to these records was so positive and intensely so. I guess the standard line I could say is, ‘Affirmation is inspiration.’ If you’re getting a lot of positive feedback from something, it makes you feel like you’re on the right track. So it was a creatively fertile friggin’ period for me.”

Hornsby also made an appearance at Vernon’s Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival—performing a set of his own music and taking part in a Day of the Dead regrouping with that album’s blog-era participants. While there he was also turned on to the English indie-folk act The Staves and the modern chamber ensemble yMusic, both of whom ended up appearing on his next studio efforts.

“I guess I could say that Justin Vernon opened this door for me, and I went through this door, only to find that there were a whole lot more people in this room that felt the same way about me as he did,” Hornsby says. “So I started working with all these people like James Mercer, Jamila Woods, Ezra, and on and on.”

“I’m from the generation that can’t quite remember if we heard Bruce’s ‘The Way It Is’ or Tupac’s ‘Changes’ first,” Koenig says, referencing the ’90s hip-hop hit that samples Hornsby’s original composition. “I was probably in college when I dug deeper into his albums. Bruce and I were first connected via Ariel Rechtshaid, who had worked with both of us. I also interviewed Bruce on my internet radio show. When he hit me up about being on his album, it was an easy yes.”

Koenig pops up on “Memory Palace,” a key Indigo Park number which zeros in on Fibonacci sequences and mnemonic devices. “We’d already written ‘Sidelines’ together a few years ago, and he’d played on a couple of songs on Absolute Zero,” Hornsby says. “So it’s same new crew, not the same old crew, coming to my aid here.”

“Bruce kind of spans the generations,” Koeing adds. “He’s a great musician, of course, but also has a personality that’s fun to be around. He’s just got a love of music and a sense of humor that would equally appeal to the ’60s guys who embrace him as well as the younger generations who look up to him.”

Hornsby took his connection with yMusic, a classical ensemble with deep roots in The National’s ecosystem, a step further, inviting them and The Staves to participate in the Funhouse Fest he put together in Williamsburg, Va., in 2017. Then he ended up spinning his work with yMusic out into a new entity altogether, BryhM, dropping the record 2024 Deep See Vents and touring under the moniker around its release.

“They had recorded a lot on Absolute Zero and [yMusic’s] Rob Moose and I had become sort of joined at the hip. We did so much together and still do, still will,” Hornsby says. “yMusic asked me to do a little tour with them. They reached out in the fall of 2019 because they had done a few things with us already, like at the [Brooklyn, N.Y. avant-garde space National Sawdust]. And they asked me if I’d be interested in doing a short five-gig tour with them in the Northeast.”

Blending right in with yMusic, Hornsby used the occasion to showcase the music they had worked on together thus far and to reset some of his signature originals. Moose also pitched the idea of writing a new number that they could slot as an encore each night.

“I said, ‘Sure, send me some music,’ so they did,” Hornsby says, “And I wrote this crazy aquatic piece, which ended up leading to a whole record because Deep Sea Vents is of a piece on a subject-matter level. So we wrote this song, ‘Deep Sea Vents,’ played it to great effect on the gigs, and then, a week or 10 days after that tour ended, the world shut down when COVID hit.”

The musicians continued honing a new batch of material remotely to keep the momentum going, and when the world began to turn back on its axis and eventually reopen, reconvened the following fall.

“We said, ‘We’re just here, we can’t do anything,’” Hornsby says. “So I said, ‘Send me some more music.’ They did, and gradually, over the next year and a half, we came up with the 10 songs that comprise Deep Sea Vents.”

Another featured player popping up throughout some of Hornsby’s recent output is Mills, the 39-year-old guitarist and producer whose discography connects the dots between Palladino, Fiona Apple and Dawes. Hornsby first met Mills through Berg, a producer and A&R veteran who works at Sound City in the San Fernando Valley and spent the recent part of his career helping mentor Sombr, Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers and boygenius.

“Blake played on one of my records in 2009, when he was about 18 years old, because he was kind of joined at the hip with Tony even back then and serious about the work,” Hornsby admits. “So it was very natural for Blake, who’s in the next room at Sound City, to come in and play on Indigo Park.”

While Berg has assumed the role of an associate producer on past Hornsby releases, this time the piano player reached out about him “producing this record very intensely with me, completely involved and right in there.”

After Hornsby had written nine songs for consideration, he sent them to Berg for feedback. But then there were crickets.

“The loud silence ensued for two weeks,” Hornsby says. “I’m going, ‘Well, OK, wow, I guess he’s not into it.’ And then, as I’m boarding a plane in the Charlotte airport, he calls to say, in a nutshell, that he likes all nine tracks. Who would’ve thought? Tony’s a tough room. So, of course, that makes you feel great. So then we’re off. We made our schedule. He’s a very busy guy; he’s always producing different people, mostly younger musicians. And I’m by far the oldest geek in the room. But we have a great simpatico.”

Hornsby says that he met with Berg casually over the next year, mostly at Sound City. The ideas they were coming up with were consistently adventurous, casting Hornby’s reflective lyrics in forward-thinking music. Then, to round out the set, Hornsby came up with what he describes as an “old-time BH song” that boasts both Palladino and the Noisemakers’ Gibb Droll on guitar, “Take a Light’s Train.”

“That’s the way it should be for me,” he says. “I’m not interested in revisiting and recreating something that was popular in the past. Gibb played some very modern, beautiful guitar on ‘Take a Light’s Train,’ but what I’m doing could have been done 35, 40 years ago. So I did throw one bone to the poor, old, nostalgia-loving fan who just wishes I’d make that same record every time.”

While firmly focused on the future, even as he reflects on the past in his present-day songs, Hornsby is releasing Indigo Park between two milestone anniversaries. This past October marked the 25th anniversary of his first live album, Here Come the Noise Makers, which showcased the touring combo that would eventually be dubbed the Noisemakers. And April will mark the 40th anniversary of Hornsby’s debut record, The Way It Is, which turned him into a household name and peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard charts.

“People started calling it the Noisemakers because of that live album, but the album name comes from this old biker-bar lounge we used to play,” Hornsby clarifies of a period in the 1970s when he was a local entertainer. “We played at this funky place in Virginia Beach called The Cave. A lot of young country boys would be there at the bar when we’d come in to rehearse. We were playing some Grateful Dead and ‘Aja’ by Steely Dan, kind of jazzy pop music and rock music. They were not really into what we were doing, and there was this one guy named Donny, and he’d be sitting there at the bar. We’d walk in, and he’d look at us derisively and kind of hiss at us, ‘Here come the noise makers.’ We used to say that to each other all the time as a joke, ‘Oh, here come the Noisemakers.’ And so, it just seemed like a good title for our first live record. We had no name. But then a lot of fans started referring to the band as the Noisemakers because of that record title, so just we said, ‘We’ll call it that.’ So we’ll thank Donny from The Cave on Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach, in 1979, for the Noisemakers’ name.’”

Hornsby’s feelings about The Way It Is remain more complicated. The album launched him into the stratosphere and included standards like “Mandolin Rain” and “The Way It Is” itself, but he was never happy with his performance.

“I thought that at the very beginning, before the record was released,” Hornsby admits. “We were living in Van Nuys, and my wife came in from work. She comes into this dark room, and I’m sitting there on the couch, kind of quiet. She said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And I said, ‘Well, I hate my record.’ I had just heard the mastered version for the first time, the vinyl refs, because that was still the vinyl era, and I just wasn’t feeling it. I’m not a fan of that singer, that guy, an idiot version of me. It’s not the band’s fault, but there was just some stuff going on. I hadn’t learned how to say no yet. I hadn’t learned how to stick up for myself so much, so things happened that I thought were not so great. I just don’t think it ages well, and there are a lot of people who feel that way, too. We had a lucky accident there, a great fluke, with ‘The Way It Is’ in England, and that went around the world. And, all of a sudden, we were headliners on nine songs.”

Hornsby decided to build out his shows with his then-current group, the Range, adding in a few well-placed covers, including the traditional “I Know You Rider” and Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Both numbers have been associated with the Dead for many years and helped put Hornsby on the band’s radar. Soon after, he was invited to open for the Dead at the Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, Calif. in 1987, leading to numerous sit-in appearances and a two-year stint as a touring member following Brent Mydland’s death.

“We were doing ‘I Know You Rider’ after our song, ‘Red Plains,’ the last song on that record. Rather than ‘China Cat’ > ‘Rider,’ ours was ‘Red Plains’ > ‘Rider.’ And that worked great,” he says. “When we did ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ we sort of did The Band’s version, the version Levon and Garth did with the accordion, and, of course, Bobby sang it for all those years.”

But while The Way It Is helped place Hornsby and the Range on marquee stages, it also pushed them into some pop circumstances that they were never entirely comfortable with. His follow-up release, 1988’s Scenes from the Southside, which spawned “The Valley Road” and “Jacob’s Ladder,” felt like a stylistic sequel, but then Hornsby moved on, dropping the Range name by 1993’s Harbor Lights and retaining only drummer John Molo, who also accompanied him into The Other Ones in the late 1990s.

In terms of recent shows, he cites a run of dates the Noisemakers did with the rising Connecticut-bred jamband Eggy this past fall that featured a swath of cross-band collaborations. Highlights from a two-show stand at Woodstock, N.Y.’s Bearsville Theatre were also packaged as a holiday special via Relix.

“They’re huge devotees, regarding my music,” Hornsby says. “They made a list of about 20 songs that they hoped to play with us. And a lot of them were newer songs—‘My Resolve’ is one of their favorites. ‘My Resolve’ is a sort of big, three-part harmony song in the chorus, and Mike [Goodman] and Alex [Bailey] put together a video of them harmonizing with a solo piano version I had on YouTube. And it sounded so beautiful. That was their audition day, and they passed with flying colors. They already knew the music, and it was just a great hang and a great playing experience. When I first met them, I said, ‘It’s nice to meet you guys, and we’ll be opening for you pretty soon.’ That could easily happen because they seem to be on the rise, and they freakin’ mean it. They are deeply involved. They’re beautiful guys and we had the best time with them.”

“When we were thinking about how to promote the shows we were doing together, we remembered the stripped-down version of ‘My Resolve’ that Bruce and James Mercer released during quarantine,” Brownstein says. “That song means a lot to our band. I cannot even count how many times we have listened to it together. Having Alex and Mike harmonizing alongside our heroes felt like the most natural thing in the world. It ended up becoming a bit of a calling card for what would later turn into real collaborations. I will never forget the first show of the run when Alex and Mike were called up during soundcheck to work on that song. I was standing there just taking it all in. It felt like watching a dream unfold in real time. Later on, Dani [Battat] and I found our way into some of those performances, too. We are incredibly grateful to Bruce and his band for welcoming us into that world.”

Brownstein, who is in his 30s, also notes that Hornsby’s music came to him in an unexpected way.

“He performed a solo piano version of ‘Mandolin Rain’ in the 2009 Robin Williams film World’s Greatest Dad, and I was instantly hooked,” he says. “From that moment on I dove into everything he had done. Bruce’s music has been a guiding light for me, and each of his records represents a different chapter of my life. His songs have helped me celebrate during joyful times and have also helped me process some of the most challenging moments I have experienced. Indigo Park is just as stunning as anything in his catalog. I am constantly in awe of his creativity. It feels endless. Every time he releases something new, it reminds me how deep his well of inspiration really is. ’Flicted was especially meaningful to me. I have listened to that record countless times, and it was an absolute honor to perform his masterpiece ‘Days Ahead’ with him and the band.”

Looking ahead, Hornsby will spend much of the year on tour, with headlining theater dates and festival appearances already lined up well into the summer. On the creative front, he’s looking forward to finally taking that well-deserved vacation from writing, though he’s already started tinkering with one idea.

“I have written a song that I like quite a bit. It’s about an artificial friend, an AI friend,” he hints. “I’m always writing, always working on new music, so you never know, a song like ‘Indigo Park’ might come along and refuse to delete itself from my brain. There are lots of beautiful, young producers who want to work with me. They’re always bugging me. These guys are some of the most top-of-the-line producers in the world, and they want to work with grandpa, so that’s also very intoxicating, very alluring. So, while I’ll need a freakin’ break, it’s also hard to know what’s next.”