CJ Camerieri had never seen anyone enjoy live music the way Bruce Hornsby did. At the expansive Eaux Claires Festival in the Summer of 2016, yMusic, cofounded by trumpeter Camerieri a decade earlier, was in the midst of premiering a program with English folk trio The Staves. Camerieri glanced to the side of the stage and spotted a basketball-tall man in sweatpants, bouncing around and beaming to what was being played feet away: Hornsby, of course. After the set, he raved to the combined ensembles, inviting them to his own Virginia festival. A collaboration on Hornsby’s 2019 album, Absolute Zero, followed, as did a short spate of shows in the early days of soon-to-be-doomed March 2020. 

For those five dates, yMusic’s other cofounder, violinist Rob Moose, hatched an idea: What if they wrote a song together and offered it up every night, the unexpected and previously unheard encore? And so, “Deep Sea Vents”—an almost-vaudeville prance, with horns splashing and bass diving, a musical simulacrum of the teeming underwater world Hornsby delightfully described—was born. Every night, the song became a cumulative joy, like a triumphant showtune from an aquatic musical that didn’t exist.

“Deep Sea Vents” is now the finale and title track of a spirited full-length collaboration between Hornsby and yMusic (BrhyM, you can call them), built with the same enthusiasm and openness that both parties spotted in one another on that steamy day eight years ago. An album of 10 songs about water and the ways we live with, in, or against it, Deep Sea Vents is Hornsby and yMusic as you have never heard them but also instantly identifiable in their own ways. His instant melodic ease joins their rhythmic precision and endless versatility, pulling each toward new currents. 

Together, they turn the various states of water into a metaphor for a difficult first date over drinks during “Phase Change,” Hornsby’s piano climbing the ladder of yMusic’s pizzicato plucks and woodwind smears. And in their hands, the existential anxiety of exploration becomes a funky strut stuck somewhere between triphop and Ligeti for “Deep Blue,” with Hornsby on electric sitar. Just as the ocean reminds us of how much we have to learn about our world, Deep Sea Vents reflects just how limitless musicians in one another’s mutual thrall can be.

Several months after the pandemic scuttled all future plans, Moose again asked Hornsby if he might be interested in writing more songs with yMusic. Sequestered in his Virginia studio, Hornsby readily accepted. yMusic began dispatching pieces to him, only to be stunned by how quickly he would respond with finished songs, rising to meet even their most abstract ideas with inexhaustible élan. The dipping horns and slashing strings of one offering became the prompt for a quasi-rap, Hornsby detailing the life and eccentricity of the egg-laying mammal on “Platypus Wow.” During another, wispy dissonance yielded suddenly to devilish strings and shouting horns, as though some faction of an orchestra had rebelled against sonority; for Hornsby, it became “Barber Booty,” a madcap advertisement for pirate escapades. Much to yMusic’s surprise, Hornsby changed very little about their songs but instead found ways to situate himself inside them, for his hooks to become the anchors of their instrumentals and then respond, more or less, with a what-else-ya-got gusto.

Every song on Deep Sea Vents betrays this same sense of wonder, musically and conceptually. Neither Hornsby nor yMusic set out to write a record about a world of water, but Hornsby simply found that’s where his adult curiosity about science and most everything else happened to lead him. Finally reading Moby-Dick, for instance, he was shocked by Herman Melville’s humor, so he lends that delight to opener “The Wild Whaling Life,” his dulcimer lifting a refrain that works as a proclamation of pride. 

“The Wake of St. Brendan” stemmed from The New York Times’ obituary of Tim Severin, a sailor who re-created the arduous journeys of early explorers. His voice warped by electronics and teased by strings, Hornsby sings a hymn not just for Severin but for anyone who’s found an unorthodox way of existing, of following an obsession to the very ends of the earth. And the gorgeous but heartbreaking “Foreign Sounds” finds Hornsby picking up the croon of George Jones to share the perspective of a clownfish, lost at sea because of the underwater noise pollution that is currently wrecking ecosystems. The song comes from Hornsby’s rapacious reading, but it is much more than an academic exercise; it is, instead, a true ballad for the blighted, the heartsick, and the stranded.

Early into Deep Sea Vents, during “(My) Theory of Everything,” Hornsby adds meaty chords to yMusic’s delicate string whorls and sputtering horn lines. He steadily relays the story of a scientist in a nearby aquatic research lab, checking for pollution and analyzing data to do his job. “I love marine research, saving estuaries,” Hornsby sings, a slight wink in his delivery. As this anonymous expert goes about his day, he’s also developing his theory of everything in secret, building a unified framework for how the world really works. 

It is a reminder of the depth that people, like the ocean, ferry beneath the surface. That is, it’s sort of like the pianist with some decades-old radio hits singing strangely beguiling and empathetic songs about sea life and the lives we make there with an esteemed new music ensemble—the one, that is, that kept offering up invitations to play because they recognized a kindred spirit when they saw one, bouncing along there on the side of the stage.