Verve
2009
Levitate
About This Album
If there were any doubt that Bruce Hornsby had completely redefined himself as a "do whatever I want to" musician rather than the pop/rock singer/songwriter he had appeared to be upon his popular emergence 20 years earlier, that doubt should have been dispersed by his two album releases of 2007, the bluegrass duo set Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby and the jazz trio session Camp Meeting with Christian McBride and Jack DeJohnette. That liberation accomplished at last, Hornsby unsurprisingly returns to the pop/rock singer/songwriter mode on Levitate, his first album since 1993's A Night on the Town to be co-credited to his backup band. But his old group the Range is long gone, replaced by an ensemble pointedly called the Noisemakers (John "J.T." Thomas on organ and keyboards, Bobby Read on reeds, Doug Derryberry on guitar, J.V. Collier on bass, and Sonny Emory on drums), who have been backing him as a unit since 2002 -- although some of the musicians have been with him since the early '90s -- and the sound of Levitate only occasionally recalls the Bruce Hornsby of "That's the Way It Is," "Mandolin Rain," and "The Valley Road." Instead, he and the Noisemakers come up with combustible jazz-rock arrangements revealing the influence of Steely Dan (notably on "Paperboy") and Brian Wilson ("Michael Raphael"), used to support sometimes bizarrely humorous lyrics, as signaled by the opening song, "The Black Rats of London.
Track List (try tracks 3,8 and 9)

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