Bruce Hornsby & yMusic Debut Music Video for “The Wild Whaling Life”
New Album DEEP SEA VENTS Out Now
BrhyM On Tour Now Across North America
Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers Touring This Summer
2024 Tour Dates
*Indicates BrhyM tour date
April 4 - Carmel, CA - Sunset Center Theater*
April 5 - San Francisco, CA - Herbst Theatre*
April 7 - Santa Rosa, CA - Luther Burbank Center for the Arts*
April 9 - San Luis Obispo, CA - Cal Poly Performing Arts Center*
April 10 - Thousand Oaks, CA - The Bank of America Performing Arts Center*
April 21 - Seattle, WA - Benaroya Hall*
April 23 - Denver, CO - Paramount Theatre*
June 27 - Plymouth, MA - Plymouth Memorial Hall
June 29 - Kingston, NY - Ulster Performing Arts Center
June 30 - Westhampton Beach, NY - Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center
July 2 - Bethlehem, PA - Musikfest Café
July 6 - Hammondsport, NY - Pavilion at Point of the Bluff Vineyard
July 8 - North Tonawanda, NY - Riviera Theatre and Performing Arts Center
July 9 - Akron, OH - Goodyear Theater
July 12 - Madison, WI - Orpheum Theater
July 14 - Interlochen, MI - Corson Auditorium
July 26 - Reno, NV - Grand Theatre at the Grand Sierra Resort & Casino
July 28 - Ojai, CA - The Libbey Bowl
July 31 - West Hollywood, CA - Troubadour
August 1 - West Hollywood, CA - Troubadour
August 4 - Flagstaff, AZ - Pepsi Amphitheater
August 7 - Albuquerque, NM - Kimo Theatre
August 8 - Santa Fe, NM - The Lensic Performing Arts Center
August 10 - Fort Collins, CO - Venue TBD
August 11 - Boulder, CO - Chautauqua Auditorium
August 13 - Jackson, WY - Jackson Hole Center for the Arts - Center Theater
August 15 - Livingston, MT - Pine Creek Lodge
August 17 - Portland, OR - Revolution Hall
September 18 - Germantown, TN - Germantown Performing Arts Center
September 20 - Louisville, KY - Bourbon & Beyond (Festival)
September 22 - Charlotte, NC - Knight Theater
September 24 - Rocky Mount, VA - Harvester Performance Center
September 25 - Durham, NC - The Carolina Theatre
September 28 - Washington, DC - Warner Theatre
October 1 - Red Bank, NJ - Count Basie Center for the Arts
October 2 - Collingswood, NJ - Scottish Rite Auditorium
October 4 - Burlington, VT - Flynn Center for the Performing Arts
October 5 - Portsmouth, NH - The Music Hall
BrhyM, the collaborative project featuring Bruce Hornsby and the experimental chamber ensemble yMusic, recently released their new album , Deep Sea Vents via Zappo Productions/Thirty Tigers. Reviewing the album, Uncut stated “...Those willing to immerse themselves in this vibrantly imaginative, inventive world may recognize that, though some things never change, it’s inspiring when they do.” And now the band has released the music video for the single “The Wild Whaling Life” off their album. The captivating and whimsical, stop-motion video is directed and animated by Steven Mertens who has directed music videos for artists including Sheryl Crow, Duran Duran, Regina Spektor, Mike Campbell, The Chainsmokers, EELS, Dan Auerbach, Lil Peep, Benee, Nickel Creek, Wiz Khalifa, and Deca.
“The Wild Whaling Life” is the second single off Deep Sea Vents. Of the track’s inspiration, Hornsby says, “‘The Wild Whaling Life’ is our Sea Chantey. I was finally reading Moby Dick (Melville was a funny guy) at the same time yMusic sent me this evocative track, a notable serendipitous confluence of events!” CJ Camerieri and Nadia Sirota of yMusic add: “‘The Wild Whaling Life’ was such a fun and collaborative song to make. From the yMusic side, we started with a plucky, sliding cello groove. When Bruce got his hands on it, he added the joyful, anthemic chorus — it felt to us like a classic Hornsby moment. Then we all stretched our arrangement legs, and found some really fun and unexpected textures. This one was a blast from start to finish.”
An album of 10 songs about water and the ways we live with, in, or against it, Deep Sea Vents is Hornsby and yMusic as you have never heard them but also instantly identifiable in their own ways. Hornsby’s instant melodic ease joins their rhythmic precision and endless versatility, pulling each toward new currents. The album was produced by Hornsby and Rob Moose and recorded in both Williamsburg, VA and in New York, NY. It features additional contributions from jazz legend Branford Marsalis, Mark Dover and drummer Chad Wright.
BrhyM’s genesis came to be when yMusic and Bruce Hornsby performed back-back sets before Bon Iver at the Eaux Claires Music and Arts Festival in 2016, and afterwards Hornsby reached out to ask them to play at his Funhouse Fest the next year. A musical exchange began, with yMusic first appearing on Hornsby’s 2019 album, Absolute Zero. Deeply inspired by the collaboration, the two outfits decided to head out on the road together. The shows occurred in late February and early March 2020, ending right before the Covid shutdown, and planted the seed of what has become Deep Sea Vents. Each night they performed as an encore a song they had composed together which ultimately became the album’s title track. With the lock-down freeing up everyone’s schedules, yMusic and *Hornsby resumed writing together remotely in the fall of 2020
yMusic is a leading American chamber ensemble featuring Moose, CJ Camerieri, Nadia Sirota, Gabriel Cabezas, Hideaki Aomori and Alex Sopp. Now in its 16th year, the group explores work on both sides of the classical/popular music divide and has lent their instantly-recognizable sound to commissions and projects by a dizzying array of artists including Andrew Norman, Anohni, Missy Mazzoli, John Legend, Paul Simon and Caroline Shaw. It's this same interest in collaborative and boundaryless genre exploration with *which 3x GRAMMY winner (and also ten-time Grammy loser!) and songwriter Bruce Hornsby has approached his career. With a staggering 24 albums and numerous groups, contributions and collaborations under his belt, the pianist and multi-instrumentalist continues to be a source of inspiration for young artists and an ardent collaborator.
Bruce Hornsby and yMusic are currently touring as BrhyM. Later this year, Bruce Hornsby will embark on a run of dates with his band, The Noisemakers, in continuation of the Spirit Trail 25th Anniversary reissue. A full list of BrhyM and Bruce Hornsby tour dates are below.
More about BrhyM:
CJ Camerieri had never seen anyone enjoy live music the way Bruce Hornsby did. At the expansive Eaux Claires Festival in the Summer of 2016, yMusic, cofounded by trumpeter Camerieri a decade earlier, was in the midst of premiering a program with English folk trio The Staves. Camerieri glanced to the side of the stage and spotted a basketball-tall man in sweatpants, bouncing around and beaming to what was being played feet away: Hornsby, of course. After the set, he raved to the combined ensembles, inviting them to his own Virginia festival. A collaboration on Hornsby’s 2019 album, Absolute Zero, followed, as did a short spate of shows in the early days of soon-to-be-doomed March 2020.
For those five dates, yMusic’s other cofounder, violinist Rob Moose, hatched an idea: What if they wrote a song together and offered it up every night, the unexpected and previously unheard encore? And so, “Deep Sea Vents”—an almost-vaudeville prance, with horns splashing and bass diving, a musical simulacrum of the teeming underwater world Hornsby delightfully described—was born. Every night, the song became a cumulative joy, like a triumphant showtune from an aquatic musical that didn’t exist.
“Deep Sea Vents” is now the finale and title track of a spirited full-length collaboration between Hornsby and yMusic (BrhyM, you can call them), built with the same enthusiasm and openness that both parties spotted in one another on that steamy day eight years ago. An album of 10 songs about water and the ways we live with, in, or against it, Deep Sea Vents is Hornsby and yMusic as you have never heard them but also instantly identifiable in their own ways. His instant melodic ease joins their rhythmic precision and endless versatility, pulling each toward new currents.
Together, they turn the various states of water into a metaphor for a difficult first date over drinks during “Phase Change,” Hornsby’s piano climbing the ladder of yMusic’s pizzicato plucks and woodwind smears. And in their hands, the existential anxiety of exploration becomes a funky strut stuck somewhere between triphop and Ligeti for “Deep Blue,” with Hornsby on electric sitar. Just as the ocean reminds us of how much we have to learn about our world, Deep Sea Vents reflects just how limitless musicians in one another’s mutual thrall can be.
Several months after the pandemic scuttled all future plans, Moose again asked Hornsby if he might be interested in writing more songs with yMusic. Sequestered in his Virginia studio, Hornsby readily accepted. yMusic began dispatching pieces to him, only to be stunned by how quickly he would respond with finished songs, rising to meet even their most abstract ideas with inexhaustible élan. The dipping horns and slashing strings of one offering became the prompt for a quasi-rap, Hornsby detailing the life and eccentricity of the egg-laying mammal on “Platypus Wow.” During another, wispy dissonance yielded suddenly to devilish strings and shouting horns, as though some faction of an orchestra had rebelled against sonority; for Hornsby, it became “Barber Booty,” a madcap advertisement for pirate escapades. Much to yMusic’s surprise, Hornsby changed very little about their songs but instead found ways to situate himself inside them, for his hooks to become the anchors of their instrumentals and then respond, more or less, with a what-else-ya-got gusto.
Every song on Deep Sea Vents betrays this same sense of wonder, musically and conceptually. Neither Hornsby nor yMusic set out to write a record about a world of water, but Hornsby simply found that’s where his adult curiosity about science and most everything else happened to lead him. Finally reading Moby-Dick, for instance, he was shocked by Herman Melville’s humor, so he lends that delight to opener “Wild Whaling Life,” his dulcimer lifting a refrain that works as a proclamation of pride.
“The Wake of St. Brendan” stemmed from The New York Times’ obituary of Tim Severin, a sailor who re-created the arduous journeys of early explorers. His voice warped by electronics and teased by strings, Hornsby sings a hymn not just for Severin but for anyone who’s found an unorthodox way of existing, of following an obsession to the very ends of the earth. And the gorgeous but heartbreaking “Foreign Sounds” finds Hornsby picking up the croon of George Jones to share the perspective of a clownfish, lost at sea because of the underwater noise pollution that is currently wrecking ecosystems. The song comes from Hornsby’s rapacious reading, but it is much more than an academic exercise; it is, instead, a true ballad for the blighted, the heartsick, and the stranded.
Early into Deep Sea Vents, during “(My) Theory of Everything,” Hornsby adds meaty chords to yMusic’s delicate string whorls and sputtering horn lines. He steadily relays the story of a scientist in a nearby aquatic research lab, checking for pollution and analyzing data to do his job. “I love marine research, saving estuaries,” Hornsby sings, a slight wink in his delivery. As this anonymous expert goes about his day, he’s also developing his theory of everything in secret, building a unified framework for how the world really works.
It is a reminder of the depth that people, like the ocean, ferry beneath the surface. That is, it’s sort of like the pianist with some decades-old radio hits singing strangely beguiling and empathetic songs about sea life and the lives we make there with an esteemed new music ensemble—the one, that is, that kept offering up invitations to play because they recognized a kindred spirit when they saw one, bouncing along there on the side of the stage.
