What bruce hornsby album has "rainbow's cadillac"
Executive summary
"Rainbow's Cadillac" is a Bruce Hornsby song first released on his 1993 album Harbor Lights; the track also circulated as a single and appears in live/video releases and covers, so its presence is tied primarily to that Harbor Lights era [1] [2] [3]. Discographic databases, streaming services, fan sites and contemporaneous release notes consistently attribute the song to Harbor Lights and note later single and performance releases [4] [1] [5].
1. Harbor Lights: the album that introduced "Rainbow's Cadillac"
Authoritative music sources and major streaming platforms list "Rainbow's Cadillac" as part of Bruce Hornsby’s 1993 Harbor Lights album, making Harbor Lights the original commercial home for the song [1] [3]; discography entries on aggregators such as Discogs identify the track within Harbor Lights’ tracklist and related single releases [4].
2. Singles, live recordings and video tie-ins that extended the song’s life
Beyond Harbor Lights, "Rainbow's Cadillac" was issued in single form in the mid‑1990s and appears on live/video recordings—Discogs documents single and live-video releases, and collectible listings (including a 1994 CD single and a BMG home video credit) tie the song to concert recordings and the A Night On The Town release [2] [5] [4].
3. Fan and archival sources corroborate the Harbor Lights origin and ongoing performance history
Grateful Dead–related discographies and long‑running fan sites track Hornsby’s performance history and list "Rainbow's Cadillac" as first released on Harbor Lights in 1993, noting the song became a regular part of Hornsby’s live sets and was sometimes incorporated into medleys—evidence that its identity is strongly associated with the Harbor Lights period rather than a later studio album [3] [6].
4. Covers, adaptations and metadata show the song’s broader footprint
The song was written by Hornsby and later covered by other bands (for example, The Other Ones included a version on The Strange Remain), and performance‑track and karaoke markets list the song as originating from Hornsby’s catalog—these downstream usages repeatedly cite the Harbor Lights attribution on streaming and catalog pages [7] [8] [9].
5. Where reporting could confuse listeners: live vs. studio contexts and misdated pages
Some fan pages and secondary sites document live performances, bootlegs, or later writeups that might suggest alternate origins or prominent live‑version dates, which can be misleading if a reader conflates a popular live arrangement with the original studio release; primary commercial metadata and streaming listings, however, place the original release squarely on Harbor Lights [10] [1] [6]. It should be noted that a few sites date pages or posts later (for example, archived fan analyses) that reflect ongoing performance history rather than original release information [10] [6].
Conclusion: a clear, evidence‑based answer
The evidence converges: "Rainbow's Cadillac" first appeared on Bruce Hornsby’s 1993 Harbor Lights album, and that album credit is echoed across streaming services, discographic databases, fan archives and performance histories; the song’s subsequent single releases and live/video inclusions expanded its visibility but did not change its original Harbor Lights provenance [1] [4] [2] [3].