Bruce Hornsby says the “origin story” of his new album Indigo Park is “very clear.” And interesting — especially since he wasn’t even planning on making it.
Out today, April 3, Indigo Park follows, and is now part of, one of the most prolific stretches of a recording career that dates back 40 years to Hornsby’s triple-platinum debut (and title track signature hit) The Way It Is. From 2019 he’d released five albums in six years, including Absolute Zero, built from unused instrumental pieces Hornsby composed during his time scoring for Spike Lee, and two collaborations with the New York chamber troupe yMusic.
“I was trying not to write songs,” Hornsby tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in his native Williamsburg, Va. “I’d been so feck and so fertile creatively, so I was kind of burnt with all that — not just with the writing process but burnt with the recording and producing. So I was ready for a break from it all.”
But a new song idea — which became Indigo Park’s reflective and autobiographical title track — interfered with that plan.
“It just wouldn’t let me go,” Hornsby recalls. “I kept giving it the Heisman, giving it the stiff-arm, but to no avail. After about four or five months into trying to not deal with this and having it come roaring into my head at three in the morning, four in the morning, I finally succumbed to the insistence of this idea and decided, ‘OK, I’ll take a deep dive and write this song.’
“I was getting chills while I was writing it and recording it, and that’s telling you something because you can’t force chills. It either happens or it doesn’t, but when it does happen you need to listen to that. You need to follow the chills.”
And when Hornsby’s opinion of the song was confirmed by his “little coterie of like-minded nerds and geeks whose opinions I trust” — including his brother and onetime lyricist John Hornsby — “it made me go, ‘OK, motherf***er, I guess you have to write nine more.”
With guest appearances from Bonnie Raitt, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Blake Mills, songwriting collaborations with Robert Hunter and one of the last recordings by Bob Weir, Indigo Park is among Hornsby’s most ambitious and stylistically far-reaching of his 22 studio releases. That’s saying something in a catalog that’s played hopscotch between…well, just about every genre imaginable, from pop to contemporary classical and all points in-between. And while he’s at his piano throughout its 10 tracks, the album also finds Hornsby playing a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar — “It’s my Bruce McGuinn” record, he quips, referencing the Byrds co-founder who made the instrument famous — on six of the tunes.
“I’m just interested in pushing the norms and forms of the popular song and make a sound that I haven’t heard before,” explains Hornsby, who co-produced Indigo Park with Tony Berg and Will Maclellan and recorded mostly at legendary Sound City in Van Nuys, CA. “I know that sounds pompous, maybe, but I hope that every third song or so there’s something that’s hopefully gonna bend your ear and take you to a new and adventurous place where you may not have dealt with in the basically white-not universe we live in in popular music.”
Another Musical Hot House
Two of those “out there” moments come from his collaborations with Hunter, who passed away 2019; they mark the last of five songs the two wrote together from 2008. “‘Alabama’ is a totally wild song lyrically,” Hornsby notes. “It’s completely whacky, and I love it. And it made me feel like, ‘OK, here are these lyrics that are definitely atypical, so I need to write atypical music…something as crazy as the words,” drawing inspiration from Austrian classical pianist and composer Arnold Schoenberg. Hornsby also tapped sources such as Elliott Carter, Gyorgy Ligeti and Dmitri Shostakovich on other Indigo Park tracks, while “Silhouette Shadows” comes from another unused instrumental cue written for a Lee film.
“Modern classical music has been informing my music for quite awhile,” he notes.
Having Weir, who passed away back in January, on the album was particularly meaningful for Hornsby, who played as an adjunct of the Grateful Dead during the early ’90s and was part of the spin-off band the Other Ones as well as the Fare Thee Well 50th anniversary concerts in 2015. “Well, of course; it deepens the situation,” Hornsby acknowledges. Weir recorded his part for “Might As Well Be Me, Florinda,” the other Hunter co-write, during May of 2025, and Hornsby remembers that “we were all so happy about it when he sang it down to us at Sound City.
“Weir`s performance is fairly unbridled in the best way, kind of unhinged in a fantastic way, which of course fits the song,” he says. “I’d heard little rumblings about him having some health problems…then nothing, then all of sudden, gone. The same thing happened with (Bill) Walton, and with Robbie Robertson. That throws you.
“(Weir) was always so busy. We were on the phone and I said, ‘Man, you’re always here, you’re there, playing with the National Symphony, the London Symphony, doing these symphonic Dead concerts. Why?’ He said, ‘Man, I just don’t know how much time I have left, and I want to get as much in as I can’ — which, of course, at this point feels (prophetic).”
Mortality, or at least aging, is on Hornsby’s mind throughout Indigo Park as well, with songs that wax nostalgic and sentimental, as well as pensive — and even celebratory, as he sings in the title track, “Oh let these days be your delight…It’s only life, and life is enough/So whatever, it’s life and life only.”
“I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got this song, and it has a little bit to do with sort of aging and hopefully getting to be a little less of an idiot and a little smarter about things as you get older, ’cause you have a better perspective,” he explains. “That sent me heading into this idea that, ‘OK, I’m just going to write about where I am now.’ It’s the story of the record.”
The fun component, meanwhile, surfaces in the Raitt-featuring “Ecstatic,” a rhythmic, poetic track drawn from AAU basketball cheers — and even featuring the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team chanting and dancing in its music video. It’s not necessarily a musical environment you’d expect to find Raitt, but Hornsby said, “She did a great job. She heard it and was like, ‘Wow, I wasn’t expecting this.’ She said, ‘It’s so you,‘ maybe because of the sports origin story, but she’s so good on it.
“When she sent it down, we just went crazy. (Berg) got her on the speaker phone and we’re all exulting and he said to her, ‘Bonnie, I’ve always loved you, but now I’m in love with you…’”
The Way It Was…And Still Is
Though certainly a different kind of album, Indigo Park comes out almost 40 years to the date of The Way It Is, whose chart-topping title track put Hornsby on the map, winning the Grammy Award for best new artist, after a tenure in Sheena Easton’s band. Hornsby has often said that he finds his earlier releases “unlistenable” — “Mostly because I’m not a fan of that singer,” he says — but he appreciates what it meant for his career.
“The mass of the world knows me for that one song,” he acknowledges. “In America I was sort of a four- or five-hit wonder, but in the rest of the world it’s that song. Even (Don Henley’s) ‘The End of the Innocence’ wasn’t that big abroad. What I really feel in this area is that they missed the best part. I feel like I’ve continued to grow and develop through the years, evolve. I’ve just never allowed myself to be shackled in that prison people would like to place me in.
“Let`s face it; people go to a concert because they like more than few songs by the artist, and they go hoping or, mostly, expecting to hear faithful interpretations that help them stroll down memory lane. I totally get it, but it’s a creative prison. I’ve never been constrained by that idea. So I get nasty letters all the time, nasty Facebook screeds, and I’ve learned to live with that for 40 years now.”
Unafraid of stoking that ire again, Hornsby and his band, the Noisemakers, return to the road just after Indigo Park’s release, on April 9 in Cincinnati, with dates currently booked into October. He’s also been working with friend Jeff Daniels on music for a new play. And, as unintentional as the new album’s genesis, Hornsby may have a next venture in his sights already.
“I’ve just about written a song about an artificial friend, inspired by the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Klara and the Sun, and I kinda like this one,” he says. “It feels like a Beatles/Beach Boys thing, with some interesting chord movement. I can almost sit there and play it for someone so…maybe that’s the start of something.”
Stream Indigo Park below.
