Bruce Cockburn

Because there's no thread.

Always happens: the more exemplary the song on YouTube, the dopier the accompanying homemade video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13KUZ53NWq0

one of those dudes i only know from guitar magazines.

lol canada

"If I Had A Rocket Launcher" was all over MTV way back when.

Been getting into him a little over the past year. Albums I've heard are impressive but uneven; wish a lot of times that his music was as tough as his politics and his religion -- I want him to sound more like Warren Zevon or somebody, I guess. But he's good, and seems to be a really really smart guy. Favorite album I've got is Inner City Front (1981), then either Dancing In The Dragon's Jaw (1979, with his U.S. hit "Wondering Where The Lions Are) or World Of Wonders (1986); Anything Anytime Anywhere from 2002 is a definitive CD comp. Don't have Stealing Fire from 1984, which has his almost-hit (and probably his most famous song) "If I Had A Rocket Launcher."

Christgau's reviewed a bunch of his albums:

http://robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=bruce+cockburn

http://robertchristgau.com/xg/recyc/cockburn-04.php

silent "ck" - classic or dud?

There's a tremendous album of Cockburn songs as clarinet jazz by Michael Occhipinti.

!!!

i like "lovers in a dangerous time"

and "rocket launcher", obv - i don't really know anything else though

it must be hard to tell people you love the latest Cockburn album.

I think it's pronounced co-burn.

Saw him live a long time ago - around when "If A Tree Falls" had some moderate radio airplay. Heck of a guitar player, and still to this day the only tasteful use of a Chapman Stick I've heard.

Liked his droll introduction to a cover of Python's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" - "whenever I'm at a party, people ask me to play a song. None of my songs are real party songs, so I learned this instead."

I've written about this more than once: he does the soundtrack for Goin' Down the Road, generally considered the best Canadian film ever made (it's definitely my own favourite). I think there are three different Cockburn songs, also a busker covering Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Home" and (I think) a bit of Stompin' Tom Connors playing a club. Anyway, Cockburn's title song is great. Unfortunately, no soundtrack exists.

And the Barenaked Ladies, who are sort of silly most of the time, did a fantastic cover (and video) of "Lovers in a Dangerous Time."

So I just finished listening again to World of Wonders; relevant word in the title is clearly "world," given both that the notes indicate Cockburn wrote its songs while in all sorts of hot spots around the planet and that at least half of them seem to take on global injustice bred by imperialism. Loudest and angriest and most powerful track by far, and clearly the intended centerpiece given that it's the only song where he boxes the lyrics separately on the back cover, is the opener "Call It Democracy," where he calls out the IMF (rhymes with "dirty MF"), I think years before doing so became so predictable for tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorists way to his right. Second side tries to work in all sorts of global rhythms or at least instruments, most of which I can't pinpoint, though he's clearly going for South African guitars (same year as Graceland fwiw) in "See How I Miss You." "Santiago Dawn" is a sort of rousing death march, and then there's a long subdued spoken rant written and seemingly about Jamaica called "Dancing In Paradise" ("The Prime Minister sucks ice cream in the company of a happy band of children while a naked man, sores on his neck, lies for days in Washington Blvd. gnawing chicken bones and the Chamber of Commerce thinks there's too much crime" etc. etc.); I like it, but Christgau (who calls it a "Wasp dub poem") is right that its sound ("vaguely Andean fretboards," Xgau says, instead of reggae) is fairly incongruous. Other songs were written in Tobago, "two Germanies" ("Berlin Tonight," about the wall that's yet to come down), Boulder, and Toronto, where he recorded it. I have to strain to hear most of the quieter ones, and I'm not sure I'm getting yet why he's considered such a great guitar player, and in the decade of Sting and Peter Gabriel there's something corny about all the worldbeat. But I definitely get the idea that there's more at stake for Cockburn than for those guys.

Turns out Dancing In The Dragon's Jaws has lots of great guitar, but it's way more a groove record -- going for beauty and even jazziness more than concrete songs. Or at least that's how I hear it. And some of the tracks, like "Creation Dream" and "Badlands Flashback" on Side One, are really gorgeous, tapestries with subtle Afro-Carribean underpinning that's never telgrammed like the world stuff would be on World Of Wonders. Also get the idea that its lyrics are more biblical than political, so most of them go way over my head. Still not sure what "Wondering Where The Lions Are" is about -- an optimistic Revelations-based look forward to the Second Coming maybe? And maybe something genuine to do with awe at the wonders of nature. Might well be the only Top 25 hit ever to contain the word "petroglyphs," though.

Listen to the earlier '70s albums - just before Dragon's Jaws I'd recommend Joy Will Find A Way, In The Falling Dark, and esp. Further Adventures Of.. from 1975-1976-1978. Really wonderful albums. The christian mystic gradually moving out into a broader world. Inner City Front is the end of this process, when he finally moved into Toronto on a full-time basis. He does this neat thing on his albums where he lists off where and when he wrote each song in the liner notes.

My favourite album is definitely The Charity of Night from 1996 - wonderful production and lots of Jonatha Brooke harmonies. I hardly ever listen to the last three albums. Or the 80's stuff, to be honest.

"If I Had a Rocket Launcher" is SUCH A BALEARIC JAM

Not on YouTube, but recommended: "Mighty Trucks of Midnight" -- best NAFTA song this side of Tom Joad, with Booker T. on organ.

Saw him solo last weekend in a community-college theater outside Milwaukee, and both the guitar playing and the songwriting were so strong and dense.

Also, had no idea he published a "spiritual memoir":

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-rumours-are-true-bruce-cockburn-on-his-new-memoir-51735/

I've been listening to his music all afternoon. I'm surprised there's been no mention of Humans, from 1980, which has no weak songs and some of his best. He even gets away with "What About the Bond", a God-says-we-can't-get-divorced song.
At his best, he's both clear-eyed and poetical/mystical; but from album to album, he can seem to lose all those qualities and become stiff, polemical and dull (like on The Trouble With Normal from 1983). It's not that he loses the balance of personal, political and spiritual; whether the records are good or bad, those elements are all still there, but some essence is missing.

Happy Canada Day! This guy is so Canadian. I also listened to Oscar Peterson ("Canadiana Suite") and Leonard Cohen today.

And Claude Vivier.

Saw him a bunch back in the day, always a good performer and a surprisingly gifted, if overwhelmingly Canadian, singer and musician.

Nothing but a Burning Light is a little-discussed classic.

*singer/songwriter

Yeah, that and Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws are my favorites of his.

That's a great one. "Wondering Where the Lions Are" is all time.

That's a great one. "Wondering Where the Lions Are" is all time.

His first four records are honestly perfect.

Seeing him tomorrow (tonight?), mostly because I've never seen him before and his reputation precedes him.

How was it, Josh?

I'm a longtime, if ambivalent, fan. I love High Winds White Sky and like / admire / enjoy / get swept away by several other records, depending on the day and my mood. Other times I find him awkward.

I thought it was pretty good! I'm not that familiar with his stuff, but he came off a bit like ... a less cynical Zevon? Anyway, he's clearly got a lot of physical issues - bad back, walks hunched over with two canes, probably arthritis in his hands - but sounded really strong, guitar and voice. (He said he had to relearn some songs to account for his infirmities.) I enjoyed and appreciated enough of it to put some albums into rotation and get to know him better.

I'd go with Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws and Nothing but a Burning Light, if you haven't already. Love a lot of the songs on Catching Fire and World of Wonders, but the production is very 80s.

Here he is from last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOftSr5wWvY

He turns 80 this week I think

Nope, in a couple weeks. He’s amazing!

Went to see Martin Carthy (and Eliza Carthy) tonight at the same venue I saw Cockburn, and because Cockburn had the day off anyway they hooked him up to see the show as well. Here they are meeting afterwards:

https://i.imgur.com/R4g1WXt.jpeg

the production is very 80s.

You weren't kidding re: "Stealing Fire." Kind of gives it a David Byrne meets Peter Gabriel quality (someone is even playing Chapman Stick), though it sounds like Cockburn was listening to a lot of reggae. "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" is one of those instant anthems, you can tell right from the start. I like how Christgau calls the album a "folk-rock Sandinista!". Certainly there are a bunch of Cockburn songs that are explicitly political in a way that, say, Gabriel, let alone U2, rarely if ever come off. Like, "Call It Democracy," from the next album?

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

Like, does songwriting get more radical than "If I Had a Rocket Launcher"?

I don't believe in guarded borders
And I don't believe in hate
I don't believe in generals
Or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors
Of things too sickening to relate

If I had a rocket launcher
I would retaliate

It’s a brilliant album, Cockburn in the 80s was swinging and hitting so many home runs

I didn’t know until adulthood about his first four album run of fingerstyle brilliance, and he quickly joined Nick Drake as a primary motivator/teacher, I mean, listen to his effortless phrasing on this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFAsoKHepRI

My high school music teacher assigned me to learn "Foxglove" by ear, albeit I had even less finger-picking technique then than I do now.

I don't know when he stated doing songwriting as a journalist/witness, but he's as good as anyone at evoking a specific place. The only equivalent that comes to mind is some of Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad and (oddly, but a favorite of mine) "Undercover of the Night," but many of Cockburn's songs work as witnessing details firsthand rather than developing them from research.

One peacetime one I love is the late My Beat describing biking around Montreal.

"Dust and Diesel" also does it especially well:

Battered buses jammed up to the roof
Dust and diesel the prevailing themes
Farmer sleeping on the truck in front
Feet trailing over like he's trolling for dreams
Smiling girl directing traffic flow
.45 strapped over cotton print dress
Marimba-brown and graceful limbs
Give me a moment of loneliness

Dust and diesel
Rise like incense from the road
Smoke of offering
For the revolution morning

Headlights pick out fallen sack of corn
One lone tarantula standing guard
We pull up and stop and she ambles off
Discretion much the better part of cars
Rodrigo, the government driver, jumps out
He's got chickens who can use the feed
We sweep the asphalt on our hands and knees
Fill up his trunk with dusty yellow seeds

Dust and diesel
Rise like incense from the road
Smoke of offering
For the revolution morning

Guitars and rifles in blue moonlight
Soldiers stretched out on sparkling grass
Engine broke down, they took us in
Now we make music for the time to pass
Tired men and women raise their voice to the night
Hope the fragile bloom they've grown will last
Pride and passion and love and fear
Burning hearts burning boats of the past

i don't really know cockburn at all (let alone why his name is pronounced that way) but this live mountain stage version of 'waiting for a miracle' from 1992 is great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerE6Bgo-5Q

I have a suspicion I know why his name is pronounced that way.

I don't know when he stated doing songwriting as a journalist/witness

1980's Humans. Great record!

Halfway mentioned not liking The Trouble with Normal, but it's my favorite of his '80s political stretch. It's about vacationing in tropical paradise, lotta islands and beaches, chill melodies, relaxed arrangements (for '83), but the character who narrates the lyrics is keeping his eyes open. There's violence around the edges of most of the songs, and the desultory suggestion that if it's time to die, he wouldn't really mind.

Leather-faced old men by the cafe wall
Kids in the surf splashing with a soccer ball
I gaze through curved lens
Trying to identify the sky's end
Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow
Waiting for the moon to show

Might be a party -- might be a war
When those faceless sailors come ashore
Speculation is a waste of time
You want to go have a glass of wine?
Whatever's coming, there's no place else to go
Waiting for the moon to show

That kind of stuff is partly reminds me of Zevon. Plus he kinda sings like Zevon, too.

Yeah, I see that! Never thought of it -- they come to a similar place from such different starting points.

Thanks a lot for this revive, Josh. I hadn't listened to Bruce in earnest for a few years. Forgot how great much of his stuff is. Been playing, at random for now, both old favorites and things I've overlooked. Fascist Architecture, what a song! Bone on Bone's False River -- gorgeous guitar work. Wondering where the Lions Are -- all-time jam. And so on, and so on.