A few months ago, the soulful and intense young Chicago rapper Polo G ended his sophomore album The Goat with “Wishing For A Hero,” a track that samples Bruce Hornsby & The Range’s florid, thoughtful 1986 chart-topper “The Way It Is.” “The Way It Is” is a song that’s had a long resonance within rap music. Famously, “The Way It Is” is the song sampled on the posthumous 2Pac hit “Changes,” and it’s been sampled dozens of other times. Hornsby has always been into the idea of those samples, and today, we get to see what happens when he performs with one of the rappers who used his track. Hornsby and Polo may have never met each other, but they still found a way to perform “Wishing For A Hero” together.

Hornsby and Polo’s remote performance is part of a Bonnaroo virtual event that I’m sorry to report is called Virtual ROO-Ality. In the clip, Hornsby plays his famous “The Way It Is” piano line while Polo raps the song and two backup singers sing the hook that the two songs share. “Wishing For A Hero” is an intense piece of writing, and it works when the only things underneath Polo’s verse are those two singers and Hornsby’s piano. Check it out below.

As part of the same Bonnaroo event, Horsby also played a solo version of his 1995 track “Country Doctor.” Here’s that performance:

Polo G’s The Goat is out now on Columbia. Hornsby also has a new album called Non-Secure Connection out now. Check out our recent We’ve Got A File On You interview with Hornsby, in which he talks about all those samples, here.