How’d you like to boogie with your favorite singer while he performs? How about sit behind him at the piano while he plays a song you’ve requested?
Female audience members got that pleasure at Bruce Hornsby’s show at the Carpenter Center Saturday.
Sorry guys, Bruce Hornsby does favors for the ladies only.
Sorry ladies, he’s married.
“It was one of his best (shows),” Greg Anderson said. “It’s not the best because he still has a future.”
Audience members agreed that not only Hornsby’s music brings people to the shows.
“I really liked his interaction with the audience,” said Joanie Thomas.
But the audience didn’t seem to be sorry at all – in fact they wanted him to perform well after 11:15 p.m. when he finished his third encore. He’d been playing since 8 p.m.
Hornsby prefaced a few songs with the tunes’ inspiration. While Hornsby won his third Grammy for “Barcelona Mona,” he shared with the audience that another song almost won the award.
“Folks at NBC didn’t like the title, and changed it to ‘295’ but as soon as the Olympics were over I changed it back,” he said.
“Barcelona Mona” was introduced with a story about how Hornsby laughed at bands he thought were funny. The singers in the bands, he said, ultimately had the last laugh they left the bar with a girl while he left alone.
He played songs that had made him famous like is third like “The End of the Innocence” as well as Grateful Dead covers like “This Too Shall Pass.”
Keeping with his audience interaction format he spoke to the crowd familiarly.
“These next few are requests, he said. “So if you don’t like them, well, you requested them.” Afterwards, he did his first solo piano song.
Hornsby wasn’t the only musician feeling the solo vibe that night. At one point his drummer played part of the middle of a song for so long he solicited cheers of his own. He also flipped the drumsticks in his hand and kept on tempo. Even Hornsby stood up from his piano, walked a bit on stage and started clapping.
The band played, “Hooray for Tom.” This song talked about a spelling bee winner and the narrator who didn’t do well in school who envied Tom for being on TV.
He played, “Fields of Gray, “Walk In the Sun” and “Mandolin Rain” as well as “My Favorite Things” and a Pink Floyd’s “Uncomfortably Numb,” to the crowd’s glee.
Also, Hornsby said he’d been inspired by a performance in the early ’90s. He played the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw.”