“I always wanted my songs to have a strong sense of place,” says Bruce Hornsby. “I was influenced by Southern fiction writers like William Styron and Lee Smith, who had that sense of place in their writing.”
The piano man is telling Classic Rock about how his home town of Williamsburg, Virginia - “my own little area” - inspired his 1986 breakout hit single The Way It Is.
“It’s a song about growing up in the sixties in a small town with narrow-minded, provincial attitudes,” he explains. He recalls that as a kid he was often led to believe that civil rights activist Martin Luther King was “a terrible, evil man” for working towards racial equality. “Not everyone in Williamsburg felt like that, of course – certainly my parents didn’t - but it was the prevailing attitude.”
Hornsby says that writing about the South always means dealing with issues of race and religion. “It’s clearly a moral thing,” he said in an interview with Dutch TV. “Allowing all citizens to vote, all citizens to be able to eat in the same restaurants, go to the same bathrooms, drink out of the same water fountains, ride in the front of the bus. From Rosa Parks on through the Greensboro Woolworth luncheon counter sit-ins, I was deeply interested in all that, and it related to that idea of creating a sense of place in my songs.”
Fast forward 20 years. Hornsby was living in Van Nuys, California, a working-class neighbourhood in LA, writing songs, playing gigs with his band The Range and trying – and failing - to get a record deal. One day in his garage studio, he started reflecting on his childhood in Williamsburg. Maybe it was that kind of Ernest Hemingway idea of how being far away from home, “three thousand miles allows you to see things more clearly.”
He wrote the lyric to The Way It Is first, then put music to it. “I work that way a lot,” he says. While the title and chorus lyric (‘Some things will never change’) might give the sense that it’s a sad song about resignation, Hornsby told Howard Stern that the “key line comes at the end of the chorus - ‘But don’t believe them’”. That mix of melancholia with a glimmer of hope is mirrored in the jazzy shifts of the piano chords and cascades that Hornsby laced through the song.
Forty years on, it’s easy to forget how startlingly different this all sounded from anything at the time. The prevailing style of 1986 was glossy synth-pop and power ballads, typified by hits such as Addicted To Love, West End Girls and Take My Breath Away; and here comes a five-minute piece with a 50-second intro, complex harmonies, two piano solos and an unsentimental lyric that referenced the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Hornsby himself was doubtful of its chances in the pop arena. He later told Rolling Stone that it was a “very even-running song that doesn’t reach the highs and lows that I think of as desirable”.
He first approached new age label Windham Hill, who offered him a deal after hearing the demos for both The Way It Is and Mandolin Rain. “I would’ve been happy to go with Windham Hill,” Hornsby says. “I thought: ‘Maybe this is what’s supposed to be for me.’” But his manager soon intervened, convincing Hornsby that these new songs deserved a much bigger audience.
Even though he had been passed on repeatedly by all the major labels, he took another shot, with The Way It Is as a new calling card. It worked. Two labels - Epic and RCA – wanted to sign him immediately. Hornsby told producer/ YouTuber Rick Beato in 2026: “We picked RCA, and everyone said: ‘Why are you picking them? They don’t have anything going on. Epic has Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson.’ And we said: ‘That’s exactly why we’re picking RCA! Our sorry little asses, we need some attention [laughs].’”
Hornsby’s debut album for RCA, The Way It Is, was a slow starter. Released in April 1986, its lead single Every Little Kiss stalled at No.72 on the Billboard chart. The title track was the follow-up that summer. Hornsby told Portfolio Weekly in 2006: “You’d have to give credit to the BBC Radio One disc jockey Mik Wilkojc. He picked this one song, put it on the air - boom! It exploded. We got these faxes: The Way It Is is exploding in England, then in Holland. By the time they put it out over here it was number one in Holland and Top Ten all around the world. The United States was late to the party.”
Six years after the song had launched Hornsby’s career, it had an unlikely resurgence when rapper Tupac Shakur sampled it for his hit Changes. “The song has always struck a chord in the hip-hop community,” Hornsby said. “There were so many others [who sampled it]. Tupac’s is only the best-known version. Almost all of the remakes have the word ‘change’ or ‘changes’ in the title.
"The Way It Is had been a complete fluke. Nobody thought it was gonna be anything. So to have become a big hit record was a beautiful thing, frankly, because it was totally unexpected. A song about racism, with not one but two improvised piano solos, is not the standard formula for pop success.”
Obviously it’s still a part of the setlist for every Hornsby concert, although he’ll often introduce it with disclaimers such as, “This next song is not my favourite song. I’m mostly proud of it because of its post-hit life.” But in the current US political climate, he is acutely aware of its continued relevance. As he told American Songwriter: “Just when one thinks we are making progress in race relations and tolerance, appalling incidents will occur that shock and sadden anyone who is interested in equality in American life. So sadly, the song still retains a bittersweet topical quality.”
