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Bruce Hornsby: Non-Secure Connection

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Zappo Productions
Released: 2020.08.14
Time:
 40:21
Category: Pop/Rock, Contemporary Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Bruce Hornsby
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.brucehornsby.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2020
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Cleopatra Drones (B.Hornsby) - 3:55
[2] Time, The Thief (B.Hornsby) - 3:10
[3] Non-Secure Connection (B.Hornsby/Ch.deMatteo) - 4:33
[4] The Rat King (B.Hornsby) - 2:32
[5] My Resolve (B.Hornsby) - 5:26
[6] Bright Star Cast (B.Hornsby/J.W.Johnson) - 3:17
[7] Shit's Crazy out Here (B.Hornsby) - 5:14
[8] Anything Can Happen (B.Hornsby/L.Russell) - 3:44
[9] Porn Hour (B.Hornsby/Ch.deMatteo) - 4:39
[10] No Limits (B.Hornsby) - 3:34

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bruce Hornsby - Piano, Mixing, Producer
Chad Wright - Drums
Gibb Droll - Guitar
J.V. Collier - Bass
J.T. Thomas - Keyboards
John Mailander - Violin
Rob Moose - Violin
Mike Lewis - Bass
J.T. Bates - Drums
Hideaki Aomori - Clarinet

James Mercer - Vocals on [5]
Vernon Reid - Guitar on [6], Co-Producer on [6]
Jamila Woods - Vocal on [6]
Leon Russell - Vocals on [8]

Wayne Pooley - Co-Producer on [6,9], Engineer, Mixing
Brad Cook - Co-Producer on [6]
Huntley Miller - Mastering
Tony Berg - Aesthetician, Ombudsman
Chris Messina - Additional Engineer
Chad Wright - Additional Engineer
Will Maclellan - Additional Engineer
Terry Greene - Piano Technician
Kathy Hornsby - Cover Art
Chip deMatteo - Art Direction
Marc Allan - Management
Kevin Monty - Management

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


CD 2020 Zappo Productions - ZAPPO 002
LP 2020 Zappo Productions - ZAPPO 0021

Recorded at Tossington Sound (Williamsburg, VA), Chad Wright’s House (Granada Hills, CA), Sound City Recorders (Reseda, CA), April Base (Eau Claire, WI) and a hotel room in Denver, CO

Thanks to David Macias, Lee Dannay, Cheryl Moore, Lindsay Reid & Alex Ramsay at Thirty Tigers, Ariel Rechtshaid and Eric Deines

“Time, The Thief” inspired by “The Order Of Time” by Carlo Rovelli
“The Rat King” inspired by “Friday Black” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“Bright Star Cast”, inspired by “At Canaan’s Edge” by Taylor Branch, uses material from the hymn “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing” and features a sample of “Lucid Dreams” by Franz Ferdinand. Licensed courtesy of Domino Recording Co Ltd.
“Anything Can Happen” contains a sample of “Anything Can Happen” by Leon Russell used courtesy of Universal Music Group



It's hard not to see Non-Secure Connection as a companion piece to Absolute Zero, the 2019 album that marked Bruce Hornsby's first solo record in over 20 years. Non-Secure Connection follows Absolute Zero by a matter of months and it shares a similar adventurous sensibility. If anything, it capitalizes on Hornsby's restlessness, scaling back the lingering echoes of pop and Americana so the pianist can concentrate on jazz and electronica while allowing him the freedom to dabble in R&B. The latter arrives in the form of "Anything Can Happen," a suitably funky oldie Hornsby first attempted with Leon Russell back in the '90s. Russell joins a cast of supporting characters that includes Vernon Reid, Jamila Woods, and James Mercer, but it's the ghost of Justin Vernon that hangs over the album. It's not that Non-Secure Connection sounds like a Bon Iver album, per se, but the elastic electronic arrangements and pensive undertone do feel indebted to Hornsby's chief modern acolyte; after receiving the benediction of the indie tastemaker, the keyboardist has seized the freedom to do whatever. Such freedom may be limitless but it comes at a price - namely, at the expense of clear melodies. Lyrical lines are here but they're elliptical, requiring the rapt attention of the listener, but hooks aren't the point of Non-Secure Connection. It's a moody puzzle box of an album, one that pays dividends with close listening but one that's also fine as evocative background music.

Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



The late-career renaissance of a great American troubadour continues with an eclectic album featuring Jamila Woods, James Mercer, Vernon Reid, and others.

Few contemporary music men have embraced the role of American troubadour like Bruce Hornsby. He cracks jokes, shakes his head in bewilderment at days gone by, and—judging by his broad roster of famous collaborators—is equally comfortable lending favors as calling them in. Since the 1991 breakup of his first band the Range, he’s played keys for the Grateful Dead, played jazz with Jack DeJohnette and bluegrass with Ricky Skaggs, and released a dulcimer album. (He also, legend has it, beat Allen Iverson in a game of one-on-one.)

Hornsby’s spent the last decade scoring Spike Lee Joints, and cinematic cues enlivened 2019’s Absolute Zero as well as its quick follow-up Non-Secure Connection. Non-Secure Connection’s arresting opener “Cleopatra Drones” showcases Hornsby’s ability to wrest resonant imagery from childlike turns of phrase, his layered vocals evoking a desert apocalypse of marching animals and “shoebox satellites.” Percussion sneaks in around the track’s halfway point, building a head of steam en route to a climactic keyboard solo. Similarly atmospheric production buoys “Time, the Thief,” on which Hornsby’s piano sails atop a symphonic horn arrangement.

As ever, Hornsby’s wistful, elegant melodies are the main attraction. A winding sitar and stand-up bass grab your attention on the unearthed Leon Russell collaboration “Anything Can Happen,” but it’s the earnest piano chords that make it such a winning ballad. Like much of the album, the James Mercer vocal duet “My Resolve” is grounded in cataclysmic themes; each verse and instrumental solo is its own roiling descent, each chorus an oasis of reprieve. And while Jamila Woods’s guest spot is the big-tent draw on “Bright Star Cast,” it’s driven by Hornsby and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s thick electro-funk. The engineering is crisp and capacious, their playing loose and lively.

Of the dozens of character sketches scattered across Hornsby’s 35-year recording career, the most infamous are from Reagan’s second term. In the Range’s 1986 FM-radio breakthrough “The Way It Is,” a song about the insufficiency of the Civil Rights Act, a silk-suited businessman harrasses a woman waiting in a welfare line. This was followed in 1988 by “Look Out Any Window,” a Mellencamp-ian survey of farmers and fishermen casting weary eyes at the decade’s horizon. Rather than oppositional forces, Hornsby cast the urban poor and the red state/blue-collar demo as brothers of a widening underclass, sharing interests (organized labor) and antagonists (politicos, slick salesmen, small towns and small-mindedness).

But Hornsby’s writing actually improved when he became less of a prognosticator. By 2004’s Halcyon Days, a middle-aged manifesto of a piece with Billy Joel’s The Bridge and Mellencamp’s Key West records, he narrowed his focus to subtler narrative intersections, the sort of generational divides which tend to come up more in passing and less at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Shortly before Warren Zevon’s death, Hornsby began performing Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long,” a portrait of rural patriarchy gone to seed, in concerts; Non-Secure Connection’s “Shit’s Crazy Out Here” adds a layer of post-modern paranoia to the woebegone flippancy of Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”

For all his hip affiliations and progressive politics, Hornsby acknowledges his old soul happily enough. As on Halcyon Days, Non-Secure Connection’s characters are compromised less by the objective state of things than by their struggles to keep up. On the title track, a hacker likens himself to a Trojan warrior, yet can’t quite articulate the joy he finds in sowing chaos online. Later, on “Porn Hour,” an internet porn addict considers the onward trudge of technology: “The innovation of the internet was driven by a couple on a film set/We thank the hard boys and the naked girls, for the coming of our beautiful cyberworld.” I’m not sure I ever needed to hear the “Mandolin Rain” guy marvel aloud at the wonders of PornHub, but now that I have I’m not even mad about it.

Pete Tosiello - Pitchfork



Nur wenige Musiker schaffen es, mit über 60 ihren Kurs noch einmal radikal und überzeugend zu verändern. Oft brauchen sie dazu etwas kollegiale Hilfe — so wie jetzt Bruce Hornsby.

Mit seinem neuen Album „Non-Secure Connection“ beweist der Sänger und Pianist aus Williamsburg/Virginia, dass der so ungewohnte wie kühne Vorgänger „Absolute Zero“ (2019) keine Eintagsfliege war.


Und wieder steuert ihn der Kreativkopf des derzeit angesagten US-Indie-Folk, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), auf ein spannendes Spätwerk zu. Beide aktuellen Hornsby-Platten enthalten ambitionierte Klanggemälde, die nicht immer den direkten Weg ins Ohr des Hörers nehmen wie einst sein Superhit „The Way It Is“ (1986).

Teilweise direkt unter Vernons Regie wird hier viel mit Stimmen und Stimmungen (etwa im Titelsong oder in „Bright Star Cast“ mit Jamila Woods und Vernon Reid) experimentiert. Manche Tracks ähneln zarten Kunstliedern („Time, The Thief“, „Shit’s Crazy Out There“) oder faszinieren als aufwendige Klavier-Orchester-Meditationen („Porn Hour“).

Auch wenn in „My Resolve“, einem Duett mit Shins-Frontmann James Mercer, nochmal die zugängliche Seite des Pianopop-Songwriters Hornsby zutage tritt: Insgesamt ist „Non-Secure Connection“ ein unkonventionelles Statement, das diesen gereiften Musiker endgültig in der Nähe des ätherischen Elektro-Folk-Sounds von Bon Iver oder beim raffinierten Art-Rock eines Peter Gabriel verortet.

Oberösterreichisches Volksblatt



Das neue Album ist der Nachfolger des gefeierten Albums »Absolute Zero« aus dem Jahr 2019. »Ich habe das Gefühl, dass meine Musik in den 34 Jahren, in denen ich dies tue, nie Teil eines Trends war, der irgendeine Musik-Ära definiert hat. Ich mag mich irren, aber so fühlt es sich für mich an«, sagt Hornsby über »Non-Secure Connection«.

Hornsbys Musik änderte sich, als er begann, die Entstehung seiner Lieder von Filmmusik abhängig zu machen. Durch das Komponieren für den Autor und Regisseur Spike Lee hatte Hornsby oft das Gefühl, dass die gewisse atmosphärische Qualität eines von ihm geschriebenen »Stichwortes« zu einem Lied weiterentwickelt werden sollte. Bei »Non-Secure Connection« hat er etwas Neues geschaffen, das eine breite Palette von Themen berührt, von Bürgerrechten über Computerhacker und Verkäufer in Einkaufszentren bis hin zu den darwinistischen Aspekten des AAU-Basketballs.

Das überwiegend von Hornsby produzierte 10 Tracks umfassende Album enthält zusätzliche Produktionen von Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Brad Cook, Wayne Pooley und Tony Berg, den Hornsby als »Ästhetiker und Ombudsmann« des Albums bezeichnet.

jpc.de



»... mit jedem Hördurchgang stärker beeindruckend.«

Good Times, August / September 2020

 

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