Bruce Hornsby is having a moment, and good for him.
Once you start looking beyond his only No. 1 hit, “The Way It Is,” you realize the guy has been playing in your background for years. Decades.
Hornsby has worked with almost everybody worth listening to. Leon Russell. Clannad. Bonnie Raitt. Bob Dylan. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The Grateful Dead.
He co-wrote “The End of the Innocence” with Don Henley and played on the track with Henley and Wayne Shorter.
That’s a tune with legs, and you can still hear them kicking ass 37 years later:
O beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They’re beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie
Some of Hornsby’s playmates appear on the new album, “Indigo Park,” due out April 3. Raitt, who sings on “Ecstatic,” told The New York Times that she treats herself to a live recording of her friend performing “Dreamland” before taking the stage each night.
“The guy is just still diving deep and improving and playing hours a day and stretching,” she said. “He’s the one musician I would have if I could only have one on a desert island.”
The new album came, as new ideas often do, when Hornsby had been hoping to take a break. Nope. The title song arrived first and dragged the others along to keep it company.
Hornsby told The Times that “Indigo Park” is something of a glance at the rear-view mirror.
“This is the first record where I’ve really dealt with looking back,” he said. “On a lyrical level, I’ve always been kind of pushing forward. But this time I thought, ‘OK, you’re 70, [expletive]’.’”
Sounds like he’s still moving forward to me. Don’t give up the driver’s license yet, Bruce. Try to make the ecstatic last.

Good song, and I love the sound of electric 12 string guitars, Rickenbacker guitars in particular.
I can’t find the lyrics yet, and I wonder if he drove the 41 Chevy into the Indigo Park pool?
Got some jump to it and some melancholy too. I found the lyrics underneath a “More” arrow on the YouTube clip:
Indigo, roses in spring
The air was heavy as the thunder did sing
I take a plunge in the old-time dark
Pulled her on in and put her in park
There’s a heightened sense of possibility
When you don’t know shit and you’re young and you’re green
Turbulent twinge, it won’t ease
And I’m in with you only in my dreams
Oh let these days be your delight, captured in rhythm and rhyme
Watch these drawn lines trace your life’s most scintillating times
Falling, flying, up, down, lit up like a diamond hiding in the rough
Succeed or fail it’s all the same
It’s only life, and life is enough (so whatever, it’s life and life only)
Learned how to drive an old ’41 car, first time stick shift
Carter Braxton Navarro Finn taught me how to enter with a big big hit
I made my great big entrance, greeted by the collective indifference of the neighborhood pool
I may be slippin’, slidin’ back, fading away from your view
Pushing up through, kimberlite blue
Underground root, in a turbulent flow
Pushes up through, through the ground blue
Sunlight diamonds water there at the concrete’s end
Sharp edges, looking out for you
Diving in head first, jackknife
Perfect ten – hope it never never never ends
Oh let these days be your delight, as if you’re living in a dream
Watch these drawn lines trace your life’s most scintillating scenes
Falling, flying, up, down, lit up like a diamond hiding in the rough
Succeed or fail it’s all the same
In the end life is enough
Captured in rhythm and rhyme (never quite get there)
Falling, flying, up, down, lit up like a diamond hiding in the rough
(Oh but wait til I get there)
Succeed or fail it’s all the same
In the end life is enough
So whatever
Whatever
Thanks! There’s an interview on you tube right under the Vevo song video. I got the mistaken impression maybe the car ended up in the pool.