Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby – Self-Titled

No one will ever accuse Bruce Hornsby of being a musical misfit. Indeed, he continues to spend this stretch of his career fitting in with others. His grand piano acted like a saline pump to the ailing Jerry Garcia during the Grateful Dead’s final lap around the track. Betwixt and between Hornsby’s dance with the Dead, he sidled up to everyone from Willie Nelson to Huey Lewis to Chaka Khan. Now comes Ricky Skaggs.

With fourteen Grammys between them, Skaggs and Hornsby are musical heavyweights. Their eleven-track self-titled collaborative disc is perfectly produced — which is not necessarily a good thing. Skaggs’ Kentucky Thunder recordings are monuments to modern bluegrass, but there’s never a hair out of place, not an emotional or musical hitch anywhere to be found. In the same vein, “Stubb”, this disc’s evanescent fifth track, is an instrumental that flows and glows. Polished to a high shine and masterfully mixed, it never lays a glove on the listener.

The introduction of a pianist as powerful as Hornsby to Skaggs’ string-band empire was risky. The grand piano could have landed into the proceedings like a bank vault. To Hornsby’s credit, he keeps the reins tight, and on songs such as “Come On Out”, the keys drape gently behind the chop of Skaggs’ mandolin to spotlight Ricky’s prettiest church singing on the disc.

However, the problem is the collaboration itself. Hornsby and Skaggs co-produced. If the relationship were to be psychoanalyzed, it’d be schizophrenia. Hornsby wants to go paddy on the marsh, Skaggs wants to keep it in the mountains. The tug-of-war is a draw. And throughout, there is the impenetrable glossiness of it all.

With so much talent and production, the musicians and mixers committed the bluegrass cardinal sin. To paraphrase Bill Monroe, “they done took the flavor right out of the gum.”