Bozeman Magazine

By mid-March 2020 Bruce Hornsby , in that now historical year, had completed a brief tour of five concerts.  “Then all of a sudden, wham!” Hornsby  remembers, “Everything shut down.”  With “Non-Secure Connection” to release in  summer, Hornsby began promoting the album.  “So that was fine,” he says, following  with an innocent refrain that would become spooky that pre-spring among active  musicians globally: “But our tours got postponed or cancelled.”  

“’Flicted,” the album Hornsby then began to create, marks the conclusion of  what Hornsby calls a trilogy, inaugurated with the lauded “Absolute Zero” (2019,) in  which the native and longtime resident of Williamsburg, Virginia intermingles his diverse musical passions, recording not exactly a self-invented genre but a world of  vibrant sound and text all Hornsby’s own.   

The twelve songs that comprise “’Flicted’ take their starting points from soundtrack scoring, the visuals-linked area of music composition with a distinguished history.  Inexorably at home, Hornsby investigated again the “cues” he  had written for the director Spike Lee, with whom Hornsby has worked since 1990.  These abbreviated instrumental score passages had sparked song creation on his  two previous albums. 

CARM