(Vancouver BC) — 3/14/25
By Mark Caicedo- March 20, 2025 – parklifedc.com
Live Review: Bruce Cockburn – parklifedc.com – Mark Caicedo. – Please click through for the full fantastic review with photos and videos!
23 March 2025 – Thirteen-time Juno Award recipient and Canadian Music Hall of Fame Inductee Bruce Cockburn recently appeared at The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts in a sold-out show that featured selections from across his 50+ year career. As someone who’s followed Cockburn’s work for 45 of those years, this Vancouver concert confirmed everything I love about his music and was a beautiful reaffirmation of how art connects us all through space and time.
Cockburn has released 40 live and studio albums since 1970, the latest of which, 2023’s O Sun O Moon (True North Records) featuring contributions from Shawn Colvin, Allison Russell, Buddy Miller, Susan Aglukark, and Colin Linden, among others, is the basis for this latest tour, including March 14 at The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts. My admiration and fan devotion for Bruce began in 1981 when I first saw him perform in Fort Collins, Colorado, at one of the finest (if not the best) live performances I’ve ever witnessed (a 20-minute power outage mid-concert prompted Bruce and his band to improvise, unplugged, throughout the interruption, finishing the song without missing a beat once the electricity returned).
Since then, I’ve consumed every album he’s released and attended dozens of his concerts, each a unique experience. Bruce’s ability to reflect in song his life view and personal circumstances is unmatched, whether as a Christian folkie, political activist, or international troubadour. Truth be told, each one of those descriptions still applies and today sum up the artist, and soul of the man.
His first solo appearance in 1967 at Ontario’s Mariposa Folk Festival put Cockburn on the musical map in Canada. His self-titled debut album, released in 1970, produced his first single, “Going to the Country,” and an appearance on RPM Magazine’s Top 50 Canadian Chart. Though raised as agnostic, the natural world and Christian imagery permeated much of his early 1970s songwriting, a theme that informed his human rights and environmental activism throughout the 1980s and ‘90s with songs like “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” “Creation Dream,” and “If I had a Rocket Launcher.”
“21st century Bruce Cockburn has mellowed with age, though he is no less outspoken about his beliefs and dedication to his craft, despite health hardships he’s experienced over the last few years. He’s been diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease, a chronic inner ear disorder, which affects equilibrium producing vertigo and a particularly cruel form of spinal osteoarthritis. As a result, he now moves with two walking sticks and with arthritis also affecting his hands, has had to reconfigure a number of songs so he can continue performing them.
The concert at The Centre gave us the Bruce many of us have known and loved over the decades. Looking fit and enthused (despite suffering the effects of a cold virus he’d picked up a few days earlier), the adoring audience hung on every note, lyric, and word he spoke, prompting some spirited banter throughout the evening as Bruce’s concerts are inclined to do. Indeed, the opening song was restarted as a result of a momentarily forgotten lyric that compelled one audience member to loudly proclaim, “We love you, Bruce!” That moment of grace allowed the beloved Canadian singer-songwriter to reset and deliver a nearly flawless performance.”
The above is only a partial reprint of this fantastic review.. don’t miss it! Click through.
Credit: Live Review: Bruce Cockburn – parklifedc.com – Mark Caicedo
