Photo by Jorge Lazzari via Bruce Hornsby’s Facebook page

On Thursday, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers performed at Portland, OR’s Revolution Hall as part of their current tour in support of the new album Indigio Park. Partway through Hornsby’s set, after running through a version of Hornsby’s famed Don Henley collaboration “End of Innocence” that dipped into Leon Russell’s “The Magic Mirror,” James Mercer emerged to sing on “My Resolve.” The Shins frontman, who lives in Portland, appears on the studio version of the tune off Hornsby’s 2020 album Non-Secure Connection. Shortly after the album’s release, during the depths of the pandemic, Hornsby and Mercer offered a virtual duet on the song as part of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert‘s COVID-era programming. According to a recent Relix interview, the video inspired the members of Eggy and they recorded their own take on the idea while they were discussing opening for Hornsby last year. 

“When we were thinking about how to promote the shows we were doing together, we remembered the stripped-down version of ‘My Resolve’ that Bruce and James Mercer released during quarantine,” Eggy’s Jake Brownstein said in that interview. “That song means a lot to our band. I cannot even count how many times we have listened to it together. Having Alex and Mike harmonizing alongside our heroes felt like the most natural thing in the world. It ended up becoming a bit of a calling card for what would later turn into real collaborations. I will never forget the first show of the run when Alex and Mike were called up during soundcheck to work on that song. I was standing there just taking it all in. It felt like watching a dream unfold in real time. Later on, Dani [Battat] and I found our way into some of those performances, too. We are incredibly grateful to Bruce and his band for welcoming us into that world.”

“I guess I could say that Justin Vernon opened this door for me, and I went through this door, only to find that there were a whole lot more people in this room that felt the same way about me as he did,” Hornsby said of what led him to The Shins member. “So I started working with all these people like James Mercer, Jamila Woods, Ezra [Koenig], and on and on.”

Hornsby and his band will appear at Medford, OR’s Holly Theatre tomorrow.