Last Friday was a disappointment. Back in September or October, there was a big announcement for the HellaMega Tour, a package tour featuring Green Day, Fall Out Boy, and Weezer. It was scheduled to stop at Target Field in Minneapolis, and a small group of people from school got some tickets. Green Day, especially in the later part of their career, has been one of my favorite bands. Fall Out Boy, well, sure. I’m never going to live or die by them, but I usually enjoy them when they come on the radio. Weezer has always been hit or miss for me, but when they hit they have music I really like.
Once the tour was announced, album release dates for all the bands soon followed. Weezer’s was the last one, expected to come out on May 15, 2020. Almost a year out, which was frustrating, but even more so when I heard their new song and read promises from the band of how representative that sound was of the entire album. It was supposed to come out last Friday. It didn’t, having been indefinitely delayed…because of the virus. Now, while I’m trying to figure out what digital music has to do with new music being released, it does lead me to speculate that the tour will either be postponed or cancelled. That’d be a bummer, but really, I can’t see a world in which it would still be held and I’d feel safe being in the audience.
I’d been all primed and ready to buy new music on Friday, but it didn’t happen, and, as I mentioned, I was very disappointed by this turn of events. New music during the quarantine would have been great, since it could be one of the few things that would actually break me out of this “Groundhog Day” moment of life we’re all muddling through. I looked around for more new music to scratch this itch, but didn’t find anything suitable. Until Sunday.
Last year, about this time, Bruce Hornsby released his first album in a number of years. It turned out that just last month, unbeknownst to me at the time, he had also released a new live album, recorded from the tour of that new album. I clicked purchase immediately.
Now, let me tell you a little about Bruce Hornsby since there are way too many people out there who are woefully uninformed about his career. He is NOT just the “Mandolin Rain” guy, or the “The Way it Is” guy. Yeah, those were his songs, but he will even sometimes warn at the beginning of a live show that if anyone was coming to see him play those songs, or even semi-recognizable versions of them, they’d likely go home disappointed. The music he’s been recording and playing for the last quarter century would best be described as a musical gumbo including some pop, some classic rock, some bluegrass, some country, some alternative, and even some classical. He takes all those different genres and brings them together into something distinctly his, then goes out on the road to perform with a band of musicians so ridiculously talented that they probably communicate with each other through musical ideas as effectively as they do with words.
Of course, as miraculous as the playing can be, it won’t get very far without the right songs to play, which is what brings the Bruce Hornsby Live Experience up to even another level. He’s as much of a storyteller as anything else in his songs, not just in the way so many of his lyrics are crafted into so many narratives, but done so in a way where the words and the music come together to complement each other perfectly.
I’ve seen him play live a number of times, usually with his band but once where it was just him and his piano. The shows are transcendent; you just sit there and let the music wash over you and try to keep up with what you’re seeing and hearing.
In a time when live music isn’t going to be around for a good long time, and some bands are even shelving their albums because they don’t get to immediately tour behind them, it was magic to discover the true gem of a new live Hornsby album to take in.
Just to give you an idea of what I’m going on about, I looked up a video of Bruce and his band playing one of my favorite live versions of his songs. The song they play here clocks in just over thirteen minutes, but if you’ve read this far, I’d encourage you to watch this video. After all, there’s a pandemic going on out there. What else do you have to do?
White Wheeled Limousine
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