Bruce Hornsby

Not everyone escapes the curse of the Best New Artist GRAMMY®, but Bruce Hornsby has done it handily. The upbeat melody and arrangement for the title track from The Way It Is masks a social criticism largely absent from pop hits of the '80s. Meanwhile, his distinctive piano sound served as an excellent complement to Don Henley's voice on "The End of the Innocence." And Hornsby & Branford Marsalis' "Barcelona Mona" won a GRAMMY® for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.

On A Night on the Town, Hornsby's final album with the Range, two songs ring with views ripped from the op-ed pages: "Fire on the Cross" is about race relations and the Klan, and "Barren Ground" tags both Silicon Valley greed and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. "The Road Not Taken" is a wistful, beautifully rendered bouquet to a lost love — a marked contrast to "Walk in the Sun," the story of a strip club barker.

If you want to take a radical left turn from almost everything you've ever heard from Bruce Hornsby, sample "Hop, Skip, and Jump," his duet with Ornette Coleman. As he did with Pat Metheny on Song X, Coleman pushes Hornsby outside his normal melodic safe zone and into more adventurous territory. With its abandonment of the past and ambiguously hopeful future, "Swan Song," from Spirit Trail, is a great way to close out our playlist.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has something of a checkered record when it comes to picking the year's Best New Artist. But if that artist gets a second (and a third) GRAMMY®, it's a fair bet they did their job well. Bruce Hornsby received his Best New Artist award in 1986, right between Sade and Jody Watley, which is not a bad place to be. Unlike many of his similarly honored peers, Hornsby has demonstrated a restless musical spirit, having wandered far afield from where he got his first acclaim (and fans). Not many artists can say they've worked with Branford Marsalis, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Grateful Dead, and Squeeze, but the breadth of Hornsby's talent has him on everyone's call sheet.