The Way It Is

Philadelphia News, August 29 1986: Listening to the debut LP by Bruce Hornsby and the Range (“The Way It Is,” RCA) warms me with the same sort of inner glow that those first landmark albums by Little Feat, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and The Band sparked many moons ago. And the fact that Hornsby is playing a $2 concert for WIOQ at the Trocadero on Wednesday brings such cheer that I may just come out of my post- Folk Festival, end-of-summer depression after all.

Chicago Tribune, September 5 1986: Would Huey’s good word clinch that recording deal for you? Possibly–and possibly not. Consider the case of vocalist/keyboard player/songwriter Bruce Hornsby, who was looking for a label that would sign his band, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, a while back. Hornsby indeed had Lewis talking up his cause in the corridors of the music industry, but in the end it was a kind of left- handed turn of fate, not Lewis’ efforts, that got Hornsby and his band their contract with RCA Records.

Hornsby formed the Range in Los Angeles in 1984, after spending some time as a session performer and songwriter. The band made some demo tapes and began shopping them around to labels. A couple of years earlier, Huey Lewis had asked Hornsby if he could record a song Hornsby had written. At the time, Hornsby thought, mistakenly, that he might be on the verge of getting a record deal, so he decided to keep the song for himself and turned down Lewis. “In hindsight,” says Hornsby, “that was not a very great move. But Huey and I became friends, and he just helped me out later, championed our cause in the music industry for two or three years. He would call record companies. For example, the band made one demo and turned it in to a label. The label pondered it for a few days. Well, Huey called them one day and said, ‘This is Huey Lewis. Sign the Range.’ He was always in there pitching for us. Ironically, that wasn’t what knocked down the doors for us finally, but that’s the sort of thing he would do.”

Wichita Eagle, November 30 1986: There’s not much here to look at – a stark stage, a piano, a couple of faces we haven’t seen before. Boring, huh? Hardly. Minimalistic? Quite, but that’s the quality that makes “The Way It Is” the most refreshing, cerebral video making the rounds today. Bruce Hornsby, keyboard artist supreme, is the best new bread-and-butter rock ‘n’ roll has had since the mid-’70s days of Bruce Springsteen.

Chicago Tribune, December 12 1986: The lucky–and very talented–fellow is keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, who with his group the Range has gone all the way to No. 1 on both the pop and adult contemporary charts with “The Way It Is,” a moody pop/rock song with a social message as powerful as its melodic line. And now, Lewis stands to lose because of his protege’s belated success. The No. 1 ascent of the “The Way It Is” single (up from No. 4 last week) came at the expense of Lewis’ own single, “Hip to Be Square,” which failed to move up from No. 3 this week. And on the album charts, Lewis’ “Fore!” (now No. 4) is in danger of being passed by Hornsby, probably by next week.

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On the Western Skyline

This is one of the earlier tunes in what bassist Joe Puerta called our “bucolic rock” style. I think Bruce originally wrote the music just for the fun of it and had some sort of music theater project in mind, not really a pop song.

Lyrically, I tried to set up the rush of feelings you can get around sundown on a Saturday evening when you look west at the sunset and all the rooftops and trees and phonelines of the town. You know that the whole weekend celebration has started rolling somewhere, and you get this strong urge to do something about it.

The loneliness sets in when you start thinking about just what is gong on out there. There are lovers on the shore, parties in rundown rented cottages, a dance at the Navy Officer’s club, and you hear the local night-club ads on the radio.

The line about the kite is my attempt to set the point of view at early teenage when your expectations are flying and you spend a lot of time wondering what goes on in those shiny Cadillacs after the dance.

This sticks with you a long time – the speculating and wishing that you could be there.

John Hornsby

 

Every Little Kiss

The premise of this song is how poorer families are broken up when the husband or father has to get a job far away in another town because there are no opportunities at home.

Bruce came up with this idea in the summer of ’85 when there were a lot of stories in the news about steelmills and shipyards shutting down. Around that time he was on the road in a back-up band and got a taste of the longing everybody feels at one time or another when you’re so far away from someone you love.

This song is about the basic longing and about how it gets more intense when you have less control over your life thanks to hard economic times

John Hornsby

 

Mandolin Rain

Plainly, this song is about missing someone badly. And it’s about trying to pull through when so many things remind you of her – a tune, a ferry whistle, mainly a summer storm.

But the whole thing is not really in the past. I think that the girl we envisioned is more of a free spirit, someone who leaves and comes back, but is so special that you choose to keep trying, to keep hoping.

It’s a basic song about lost love, but we tried to make it distinctive by putting it in a Southern folk setting.

John Hornsby

 

The Long Race

Bruce wrote this one at a point when things were a bit bleak on the romance and the career fronts, and Huey Lewis told him to hang in there.

We also took some information from the watermen of the Chesapeake bay in Virginia. It’s a song about having patience in pursuing your goals and sticking to it through the tough times.

John Hornsby

 

The Way It Is

I think Bruce has wanted for a long time to express his amazement about how stubbornly people cling to their intolerant attitudes – both socially and racially. It’s tough to comment on something like that without sounding preachy or accusing. But he hit on a subtle way to get his point across and then take it another step to say “Hey, don’t give up”.

The song is mainly about compassion, about understanding racial and social types, and beliefs and practices that are different from your own. It’s about a status quo that’s so complacent in its narrow-mindedness and bigotry that it seems it’ll never change. That’s why the line “Ah, but don’t you believe them” is so important.

One writer interestingly described the song as being about “the narrow-minded underside of Southern hospitality”. But it’s a universal problem, not just a Southern one.

John Hornsby

 

Down the Road Tonight

When we were kids we’d hear about some joint in town or some trailer out in the country that was a gathering place for nameless adults who were sort of people of the night … well-traveled types or just locals with a penchant for underground activity. Anyway, these places were off-limits, and we could only imagine what went on.

In the song, a naive guy falls in love with a cheap older woman and just like us kids, never really knows what’s going on. He just knows it’s something wild. And, as with a lot of things, the imagination is better than the reality.

John Hornsby

 

The Wild Frontier

We’ve never gotten used to L.A. and always wanted to get back home to the South. In this song, I called home “the wild frontier”, but whatever you picture – backwoods, mountains or open plains – it’s really tame, and definitely more appealing when compared with the out-of-control L.A. metro area.

The references to California aren’t too veiled. You’ve got smog, freeways, bisexuals and city of gold gone haywire in the first verse … sort of a Montezuma’s revenge.

And then you’ve got cosmetic marvels in the second verse trying to bite off any remote piece of the showbiz scene that they can, you know, parking attendant at Universal Studios.

John Hornsby

 

The River Runs Low

In a lot of our songs there’s a search for love mixed with other strong emotions that come from events beyond control. The boyfriend or girlfriend left behind in this song has to deal with a town that’s also going through hard times.

But even though I start off focusing on things like unemployment, a drought and a cold autumn, pretty soon it’s clear that the main reason for feeling so down is pure loneliness.

I hope it’s also clear where the sweetheart has gone – where they call the brown hills “golden”.

John Hornsby

 

The Red Plains

When I wrote these verses, I was trying to set up this catastrophe that Bruce had laid out in the chorus, and then I tried to find an upside. As it unfolded, I really couldn’t believe in an upside.

But a message, sort of a higher viewpoint, came through. Basically, it’s that after you admit that life can deal you unfair blows, you have to step back and look at what’s really lost. You see how unimportant material things are compared to just being alive.

John Hornsby