Bruce Hornsby has been one of Spike Lee's favorite composers for close to 30 years.
Hornsby has authored music for several of Lee's film projects, from 1995's Clockers to the 2017-19 Netflix series She's Gotta Have It. The hours of music Hornsby has penned for those collaborations even inspired his latest solo album, Non-Secure Connection.
The songwriter tells Q104.3 New York's Out of the Box with Jonathan Clarke that Lee first asked him to score an entire film in 2008, with ESPN's Kobe Doin' Work (which was released the following year). Over the next decade-plus Hornsby estimates he composed about 240 pieces of music for Lee, who used about half as much on screen.
"Several of these [musical] cues sounded like songs to me, like they needed to be songs," he explains. "Two or three years ago now, I had my engineer put a file together for me of 14 of these cues, and I started writing to these cues. That writing led to my record last year, Absolute Zero. ...This new record, Non-Secure Connection, it follows along that same path because I still had a whole bunch of Spike Lee cues that felt like they needed to be songs, and so hence I've continued along that path."
Non-Secure Connection is available everywhere August 14. The album includes features by Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, Living Colour's Vernon Reid, Leon Russell and others.
Watch the full interview in the player above!
Pre-order the new album here.
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Listen to "My Resolve" here: