So I had a different attitude to a lot of my friends whose parents were more conservative. It was quite political which is not something you would expect from a man born in Virginia, Bruce explained in an interview with NME, “My mother came from the New England area, and she was a little more enlightened about racial subjects than a lot of people in the South. The Way It Is looks at the Civil Rights Movement in America as referred to by the line ‘The law passed in ’64’ and that was the law which was supposed to put a stop to public discrimination.
So I started fooling around on our piano that we had at home, just got into it by ear and gradually got more serious about it later.” He went on to study music at the University of Richmond, the Berklee College of Music and the University of Miami eventually graduating in 1977. Obviously they were very piano-oriented records with Leon and Elton, and it made me want to play along with them. “I really got interested because I loved the Joe Cocker records with Leon Russell on them which led me to the later Leon Russell solo records,” he told Lydia Hutchinson. Bruce, who was born in Virginia in 1954, learned piano by ear as a kid by copying songs from the records he was listening to. Well, it’s The Range, Bruce Hornsby’s backing group which he formed in 1984. It’s highly unlikely that if anyone asked you to name the group who were made up of George Marinelli, Joe Puerta, David Mansfield and John Molo you wouldn’t know.
When Luka by Suzanne Vega came along we all knew it was about child abuse, when Phil Collins brought out Another Day in Paradise we knew it was about homelessness and when Bruce Hornsby & the Range told us about The Way Is It were learned that it was about unemployment, but in actual fact there’s more to it than that. When certain songs arrive on the scene it’s very often quickly established what the song’s content is about especially if it’s of a sensitive or delicate nature.
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