"Across the River" by Bruce Hornsby & the Range

Song 11:

"Across the River” by Bruce Hornsby & the Range

Peak: 18

Year: 1990

Year end position: NA

Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/5

Chronological Songs by Artist: 5/5

Video?: Yes

Wikipedia?:  No

Spotify?:  Yes

Lyrics:   http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/brucehornsby/acrosstheriver.html

Yesterday, the blog featured a singer from the 90s that history has not always been kind to.  Today, we have another, although I think that history has been a little more friendly to Bruce Hornsby.  At least his songs never appeared on any kind of "Worst songs of all time" list.  I think of the pushback against his style of music as similar to that of Hootie & the Blowfish.  It's pop and it's not heavy, so it was not classified as "hip".  In retrospect, the songs are actually pretty good.  Today's song is a good example.

"Across the River" also ends the string of one-hit wonders that we've had for the last three entries.  This song marks the last of the five times that Bruce Hornsby hit the top 20.  He had 5 songs make the top 20 from 1986-1990, which makes his career somewhat parallel to Starship and Howard Jones in both duration and success rate.  This also marks the second song we've had that features a location in the title.  Unlike "Abilene", the place in question is not a proper noun.  The song never specifies which river that they are talking about.   This song also is the first we've come across that is a prepositional phrase.

While doing a little research about this song, I learned that the guitar player for this song was none other than Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead.  He is not featured in the video, but it's not hard to hear once you know it is him.  The album that features this song was also a slight change in style for Bruce.  Several songs on the album "A Night on the Town" featured jazz musicians Wayne Shorter and Charlie Haden and bluegrass musician Bela Fleck.  While touring with this album, Bruce and the Range started to stretch their songs out length-wise (akin to the Grateful Dead).  Not long after, Bruce decided to disband the Range as he felt that the rock band sound they had wasn't really in line with where he wanted to go musically.  He then spent parts of the next few years touring with the Grateful Dead.  Ever since then, he has been producing music and playing concerts, just not making the pop charts.  Based on the amount of post-pop chart success he has had, I think he is totally fine with that.  It's almost like pop music was a vehicle that allowed him to make the music he really wanted to make.  Not that he doesn't like what he did, it's just that he seems much more comfortable making the music he makes now, which is less pop-friendly (at least as pop music is nowadays).

As for the lyrics of the song, they are similar to the other song we have heard so far that featured a place in the title.  In "Abilene", the singer was longing to get back to the town he loved.  In "Across the River", the woman in the song is longing for just the opposite.  It seems that the woman in the song lived in a town where not many people left.  There seems to be a certain amount of schadenfreude amongst the townsfolk in her town.  At the beginning of the song, the woman is coming back to her town and her neighbors are saying things like "Give it some time / and you'll forget about it" and "She came back with her tail between her legs", and "You'll never do it so don't even try".  As someone that has left his hometown at least twice, I was lucky enough to not have heard any of those things ever said to me.  I can understand the drive from the point of view of the woman in the song to want to move on to something different.  To be honest, with people like the ones in her town, I can't say that I blame her.  Her town sounds eerily like a cult.  At the end of the song, it sounds like she's going to give leaving another try with a very appropriate last line of the last chorus, "It still beats hanging around here".

The video more or less follows the storyline of the song.  There is a young woman and a lot of stodgy looking townspeople.  The woman does a lot of walking in fields and near a river.  There is a dream-like quality to the filming of the video, which seems in keeping with the song.  I think the song largely has the tone of someone that is dreaming about leaving the place where she grew up.  I think as part of that, they decided to use a bit of a strange lens trick for a lot of the shots.  I think that was supposed to give it a dreamlike quality as well, but I'm not so sure that it works as well as they thought it did.

As the last time Bruce Hornsby & the Range ever hit the top 20, I think this song holds up pretty well.  I like the story of the song, and the lyrics tell that story pretty vividly.  This song seems pretty relatable to anyone who wanted to leave where they were and faced people that doubted them.  I know I wanted that at one point in my life, so I liked this song.