- 2023-10-31
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MUSIC
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Bruce Hornsby Releases New Album “Spirit Trail 25th Anniversary Edition”
American singer-songwriter and pianist Bruce Hornsby released a new album “The Spirit Trail 25th Anniversary Edition” as the 25th anniversary edition of his 1998 sixth studio album “Spirit Trail” on October 27, 2023.
The album comprises 34-track, including the 2023 remaster of the original double album, four previously unreleased songs and ten unreleased live performances.
This marks his first anniversary edition album. Bruce Hornsby said why he released the anniversary edition, “Probably two or three things. One, it’s come to my attention over the years that for my true fans - devotees who’ve followed me through this crazy and stylistically peripatetic journey I’ve taken - this record is their favorite. Two, it’s the record from my more distant past that personally holds up best for me. It’s the first record where I thought the singing has aged well, and I’m still very proud of the songwriting on it. So third, we’re trying to get the word out again, shine a light now on something we thought was pretty special.”- He explained about the additional material on the anniversary edition, “To me, it was pretty far along. These were not just demos with a drum machine or solo piano demos. They featured my band playing. There was mostly piano, bass and drums on a lot of them but there was also guitar on a couple, and I’d thrown some organ on one of them. So I felt it was fairly far along. These were rough mixes but they were fairly close, at least in conception, to me.”
He added, “I’m glad these songs are coming out because they’re fun to play and I think a certain fan of mine will go, 'Why doesn’t he do this more?' I was still dealing with two-handed independence. I’m starting to learn those songs now to play them in concert, and they’re not easy because they’re deeply involved in split-brain playing. I’ll really have to practice to keep the left-hand patterns together while playing and singing freely with the right hand.” -
He said of the album cover work, “I think the black and white 'sensitive singer-songwriter' picture of me that’s on the inside is what the record company would’ve wanted, and I get that. But I felt it would’ve been so straight, so boring. I guess my only explanation is that I’ve never taken the extra- musical trappings of my career very seriously. We found this picture in an old drawer at my parents’ house, and it just killed us. We thought it was a scream. Then we showed it to my managers at the time, and they thought it was great. So we said, “Okay, this is the cover.” Because in and around the serious content there is a good bit of humor on the record. The whole “Pete and Manny” thing and some of the lines in “King of the Hill,” “Funhouse,” even “Sunflower Cat.” But mostly we just thought it was hilarious. I just have to say I’ve never been one for the cover picture of the brooding geek, you know? So that’s why I did it.”
Photo by Ryan Ojard
Background photo by Sean Smith - source : Apple Music
