#BRUCE HORNSBY THE WAY IT IS PLUS#

'Gradually, we were able to start playing more and more of my songs at these places, and we're able to stop playing 'Brick House' and do our own thing.'

'There wasn't really a 'scene' in Williamsburg, but there were a lot of places to play if you were willing to be disco- lounge whores, and we were willing,' Hornsby said. After Hornsby graduated from the University of Miami in 1977, he returned to Williamsburg and performed in clubs and local hotel bars.

#BRUCE HORNSBY THE WAY IT IS PLUS#

'It was certainly inspired by my having grown up in Williamsburg, a comparatively progressive Southern small town - progressive-ish probably because of the presence of the College of William & Mary and the professor crowd, plus the executives at Colonial Williamsburg, who often were from the Midwest and Northeast lots of my friends were sons and daughters of professors and CW big-shots - where narrow-minded attitudes were a prominent part of the environment.'īy the time Hornsby composed the song, he and his younger brother, John, also a musician and his frequent songwriting partner, had been living in and around Los Angeles for about five years. I wrote the lyrics first right around the same time,' Hornsby wrote in an email interview last week. 'I wrote it, musically, in my garage in Van Nuys, Calif., in the winter of 1984-85. Since then, the restless singer/songwriter/musician has explored an array of styles - from jazz to bluegrass - frustrating record companies looking for hits and confusing fans wanting to peg him as a melodic mix of Bob Dylan and Billy Joel.īut despite artistically satisfying subsequent albums, several of them selling at least half a million copies, Hornsby's pop legacy rests largely on 'The Way It Is.' The song partly reflects life in Williamsburg in the 1960s and early '70s, when the 58-year-old artist was growing up there.

In 1987, he won a Grammy for best new artist. Hornsby, who headlines nTelos Wireless Pavilion in Portsmouth on Sunday, never repeated the commercial heights of his debut album, which was named after the hit single and sold more than 3 million copies.

Bruce hornsby the way it is