| March 28, 2026 
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Listening to other musicians talk about Bruce Hornsby over the years, I still never really understood the full picture. But Jon Pareles’s new profile of Hornsby, now 71, filled it all in for me. “I think he made all the difference,” Bonnie Raitt said about his piano playing on “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” “The reason that song is the heartbreaker it is, is because of the way that he interprets those chords. That’s not how the demo sounded.” Hornsby’s own commercial peak came in 1986, but he was never shackled by “The Way It Is.” In 2019, he began what “turned out to be a lasting and vital phase of his labyrinthine four-decade career,” as Jon writes, which extends to his latest album, due next week. “A lot of the modern pop music — it’s four chords, and it’s the same four,” Hornsby said. “Those are nice chords. But there are others.” I saw echoes of Hornsby’s story of curiosity and perseverance in Bob Mehr’s interviews with Mike Watt and George Hurley this week — the surviving members of the influential punk band Minutemen — as they talked about carrying on, in life and in music, after their frontman D. Boon died in a van accident in 1985. “I owe D. Boon for everything,” Watt told him, and there are some really lovely thoughts from Thurston Moore and Jeff Tweedy in there, too. It was also a mega week for album releases. Jon jammed a lot of them into his roundup of songs we’re talking about, and I took a stroll through Robyn’s catalog in honor of her first LP in eight years, “Sexistential.” I also caught Cardi B at Madison Square Garden and Zara Larsson at Brooklyn Paramount, which I now realize could have been an unhinged double live review. (Both were delightful, and my deepest appreciation to Larsson for playing one of my favorite songs of last year, “Midnight Sun,” more than once.) |
