Bruce Hornsby was the first artist to grace the Fox Tucson Theatre stage when the historic venue reopened on Dec. 31, 2005.

He returns 20 years to the day later for a special New Year’s Eve concert marking the milestone anniversary.

“It’s a big milestone and the Fox has grown a lot … in that 20 years. We just wanted to mark it with a moment,” said Fox Tucson Executive Director Bonnie Schock. “People look back fondly on that opening day and Bruce was willing and able.”

Bruce Hornsby was the first artist to take the stage at Fox Tucson Theatre on Dec. 31, 2005, when the historic downtown venue reopened.  

C. Elliott Photography

Hornsby‘s “An Evening With” concert on New Year’s Eve will be his fifth Fox Tucson show since that 2005 gala.

“I was just flattered and happy that they thought of it 20 years later, that they had a fond memory of it and wanted to do it again,” Hornsby said early this week from home in chilly Williamsburg, Virginia.

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The historic Fox Theatre opened its doors after restoration with a New Year’s bash, shown here, featuring Grammy award-winning musician Bruce Hornsby on Dec. 31, 2005.  

James S. Wood, Arizona Daily Star 2005

New Year’s Eve also happens to be Hornsby’s wedding anniversary; Kathy, his bride of 42 years, will be in the Fox audience.

“She’s one of my toughest critics, and she’ll be sitting out there with raised eyebrows, going, ‘What the hell are you doing?’,” Hornsby joked.

“An Evening With” is the solo iteration of the legendary musician, who with his first band, The Range, got his big break with the 1986 debut album “The Way It Is.”  

Over the ensuing 40 years and 23 follow-up studio albums, Hornsby’s musical evolution has played out in pop, jazz, rock and bluegrass.

His latest: crossover classical.

Hornsby released “Deep Sea Vents” in 2024, a collaboration with the New York chamber sextet yMusic.

“It was a COVID shutdown era record so basically, a record made in a remote fashion when no one could go anywhere,” he explained of the project, released under the name BrhyM.

Hornsby penned the aquatic-themed lyrics to songs written by the ensemble’s members, who play violin, trumpet, flute, clarinet, viola and cello. The album, released in March 2024, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Classical Crossover Albums chart — the first-ever chart appearance for yMusic and the first time a Hornsby album topped a Billboard chart, although he has had nine Top 100 singles and a No. 1 hit with his career-defining song “The Way It Is.” 

“I finally found a Billboard chart I could be No. 1 on,” Hornsby joked.

“Deep Sea Vents” checks Hornsby’s classical music box years after he took a deep dive into modern classical in the early 2000s. He had been dropped by RCA after 18 years and rebounded onto Columbia Records, which, back then, allowed its artists to order anything from its catalogs.  

Bruce Hornsby

Courtesy Red Light Management

“So I ordered 176 CDs, and a whole lot of it was dealing with modern classical music,” said the 71-year-old Virginia native. “Schoenberg, Webern, Ives. Messiaen, the great French composer who would go into the forest and fields of France with score paper. He had perfect pitch and transcribed the musique d’oiseaux, the bird music of the forest, and turn it into piano pieces. Elliot Carter. Pierre Boulez. I just became immersed.”

That music, modernist and minimalist, has informed much of Hornsby’s recent writing, including on his 2019 solo album “Absolute Zero” and ” ‘Flicted” in 2022; yMusic, which has worked with everyone from indie folk band Bon Iver to Paul Simon and Ben Folds, had credits on both. 

For “Deep Sea Vents,” Hornsby left the music to yMusic, and he wrote the lyrics on songs with catchy titles including “The Wild Whaling Life,” “Barber Booty” and “Platypus Wow.”

“The music alone, they can get very harmonically adventurous,” Hornsby said.

Hornsby and BrhyM played a few shows in California to promote the album, which he said was warmly received in the UK.

His Fox Tucson show will be classic Bruce Hornsby, his greatest hits and stories with plenty of name-dropping — his list of superstar collaborations includes filmmaker Spike Lee, folk rocker Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, R&B diva Chaka Khan and the Grateful Dead.

His set list is fluid and includes audience requests, sometimes shouted from the hall, other times scribbled on paper and tossed on stage.

“You know you have a good, hardcore audience when the stage is littered with 100 pieces of paper, or even 40 or 50, with requests,” he said.

The song that will undoubtedly get the most attention is “The Way It Is,” a song that Hornsby put on the shelf for a handful of years because he felt it wasn’t resonating.

“But at the same time, it seems like ‘The Way It Is’ is sort of a song in the zeitgeist; it’s kind of here to stay,” he said. “It seems like it has had this amazing life as a hip hop go to, obviously Tupac Shakur’s (‘Changes’) being the most well known. … I’ve just come to feel that this song transcends just a song on a record; it’s had this life, this post-hit life in a beautiful way that makes it special. … It resides in hallow ground.”

If you go

What: “An Evening with Bruce Hornsby”

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 31

Where: Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St. 

Tickets: $58-$116 through foxtucson.com

Fun facts about the Fox: Since it reopened on Dec. 31, 2005, the Fox Tucson Theatre has hosted 2,639 events, 1,223 of them concerts, for audiences that number more than 1.2 million people.

Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com. On Bluesky @Starburch

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