40 Years Beyond “The Way It Is”: Bruce Hornsby’s UMS Debut

By UMS

Ask a casual music fan to name a Bruce Hornsby song, and you’ll almost certainly hear “The Way It Is.” That’s fair enough…the 1986 title track from his debut album with The Range spent weeks atop the Billboard charts, won Hornsby a Grammy for Best New Artist, and eventually became one of the most sampled songs in hip-hop history.

40 years on, that song is just the starting point of a career that has wound through bluegrass, jazz, classical, jam-band improvisation, film scoring, and indie-folk collaboration. And this fall, Hornsby brings all of it to Ann Arbor for the first time, with The Noisemakers, Friday, October 2 in Hill Auditorium.

Where It Started

“The Way It Is” slowly built momentum in the U.S. before exploding on BBC Radio One and then racing around the world. The album eventually sold three million copies, and the band found themselves opening for Steve Winwood, John Fogerty, Huey Lewis, the Grateful Dead, and the Eurythmics before headlining their own tour.

The Dead, the Session Work, and a Reputation as a Collaborator’s Collaborator

In September 1990, Hornsby joined the Grateful Dead as a touring member, playing more than 100 shows with the band over roughly a year and a half. It’s an unusual credential for a pop hitmaker, but it set the tone for everything that followed. Hornsby has spent four decades treating genre boundaries as something to lean on, not respect.

He’s the piano on Bonnie Raitt’s aching “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” He’s appeared on more than 100 albums by artists as different as Bob Dylan, Chaka Khan, Willie Nelson, Sting, and bluegrass icon Ricky Skaggs (the two even released a full bluegrass album together). He’s scored music for several of Spike Lee’s films.

And a generation removed from “The Way It Is,” Tupac Shakur built “Changes” around that song’s piano riff, introducing Hornsby’s melody to an entirely new audience and cementing it as one of the most recognizable samples in rap.

Reinvention as a Habit

Where a lot of legacy artists spend their later decades touring on nostalgia, Hornsby has done close to the opposite. Working with The Noisemakers, his longtime road band, and a rotating cast of collaborators, he’s spent the last several years releasing a genuinely restless run of records: Absolute Zero with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Jack DeJohnette; Non-Secure Connection with Vernon, James Mercer, and Jamila Woods; ‘Flicted with the chamber sextet yMusic and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig; and the water-themed Deep Sea Vents.

Those records helped make Hornsby an unlikely influence on a younger generation of songwriters (Bon Iver and Ryan Adams among them) who grew up hearing him as an elder statesman of adventurous pop.

Indigo Park: 2026’s New Chapter

This tour also marks a full-circle moment. 2026 is the 40th anniversary of The Way It Is — and instead of simply running a victory lap, Hornsby marked the occasion by releasing Indigo Park, a brand-new 10-song album that finds him, at 70, looking back on his childhood and career while sounding as playful and unpredictable as ever.

The record features Bob Weir and Bonnie Raitt, and it leans into wordplay, literary references, and detours into hip-hop-inflected production alongside dulcimer and quieter balladry. It was, by Hornsby’s own account, an album he tried not to make! After four records in five years he intended to take a break, but one song idea wouldn’t leave him alone.

What to Expect at Hill Auditorium

Hornsby’s live shows are famous for being different every night, with extended improvisation, deep-catalog surprises, and a setlist built more like a jazz set than a greatest-hits run-through. For this show, expect a set that moves fluidly between the songs that made him famous and the sprawling, genre-hopping work of the last decade, plus a first look at Indigo Park material for Ann Arbor audiences.

On Friday, October 2, don’t miss the rare opportunity to hear a great American artist who’s spent 40 years refusing to be defined by his biggest hit.

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Bonus

Check out Bruce Hornsby and The Noisemakers’ recent performance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.