When Bruce Hornsby announced his new album Indigo Park, part of the draw was collaborations with Bonnie Raitt, Ezra Koenig, Blake Mills, and the late Bob Weir. He’s since shared “Ecstatic,” his reunion with Raitt. Now that the album is out, we can hear the rest.
Koenig, the Vampire Weekend frontman, guests on “Memory Palace,” a glittering pop-rock track early in the album featuring a reference to the Fibonacci sequence and the charming lyric “Is that what I look like? Ha ha.” The song heavily relies on a 12-string Rickenbacker guitar rather than Hornsby’s signature instrument, the piano. Koenig and Hornsby premiered it last weekend on Time Crisis, Koenig’s Apple Music radio show, and today it has a music video.
Mills and Weir, whose band the Grateful Dead counted Hornsby as a longtime collaborator, pop up late in the tracklist on “Might As Well Be Me, Florinda,” a surrealist blues-rock tune that begins with the line “You can’t knock out the same tooth twice.” Hornsby wrote it with the late Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, and it first appeared as a solo piano performance on his 2014 album Solo Concerts. Here, it’s presented as a slow shuffle that reminds me as much of Cate Le Bon’s art-pop as the Dead’s saucy roots rock.
Both of these songs rule, and Hornsby recorded behind-the-scenes videos about each one. Check out all of that below, along with a stream of the whole album.
Indigo Park is out now via Zappo/Thirty Tigers.
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