In late 2014, just after the release of Bruce’s memoir, Rumours Of Glory, Peter Feniak interviewed Bruce and also reviewed the new memoir. Here is a reprint of that interview that appeared in the December 2014 Good Times.ca magazine.
Bruce Cockburn – Faith and hard-won maturity have calmed his “angry adolescent soul”.
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Thursday, January 21, 2016 – The St. Lawrence Acoustic Stage has brought the area some pretty big names and some fantastic talent, but none more so than their headliner on Feb. 21 when Bruce Cockburn will be gracing the stage.
“I would say that this is the single biggest show we have done at the St. Lawrence Acoustic Stage,” said Sandra Whitworth, SLAS board member. “And I say that even though we’ve brought in artists like Serena Ryder, Garnet Rogers and Shane Kayczan. But Bruce is so widely known as Canadian music royalty. We are hugely excited to have him in.”
The concert is already sold out and audiences are sure to be pleased with what Cockburn will be offering.
“There’s a few new songs,” said Cockburn in a phone interview. “My hope is to get an album together this year sometime, towards the end of the year. The show will be a cross-section, which is typical of me.” Cockburn said when there is a new album already out, there is a lot of emphasis on it during a show, but that is not the case this time.
“So there will be some new material, some brand new stuff people haven’t heard,” he said. “Otherwise it will be a cross-section of whatever. There are always a few of the ones that I feel like people pay the money to hear. Lovers In A Dangerous Time, Wondering Where The Lions Are, stuff like that tends to be in every show because people want that stuff. At least they appear to.”
https://www.facebook.com/jeffrey.garner1/videos/10153635736251655/
In early 2015 Bruce sat down with WHYY, here is the video that came from that meeting.
(video will open in a new window) ( http://video.whyy.org/video/2365579910/ )
Aired: 10/09/2015
Runs: 28:46
Bruce Cockburn, legendary Canadian singer-songwriter, has traveled to the corners of the earth out of humanitarian concerns, often leading to some of his most memorable songs for four decades. In this episode, we will explore what’s behind his passion for human rights, politics and spirituality and how he expresses this drive by creating a unique variety of folk and jazz-influenced rock songs.
May 01, 2015
In his new memoir, Rumours Of Glory, Bruce Cockburn shares stories from a career that began in the mid-1960s, following a stint at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. The Canadian troubadour also offers accounts of his world travels, social activism and spiritual life. There are plenty of musical memories as well, which are reinforced by a 9-CD box set of the same name, with tracks selected by Cockburn from his 31 albums to offer parallel audio accompaniment.
In your book, you describe your rather unique reaction to hearing yourself on the radio for the first time back in 1970.
I had been writing songs for a few years in a bunch of different bands. So I had these bodies of songs and I felt choked up on them. I felt that having to carry all these songs in my head was getting in the way of writing new ones. So I wanted to make a record, and in my imagination, that record would allow me to forget about those songs because they would have been there and accounted for, so I could get on to writing new ones. Of course, what I didn’t realize was that it doesn’t work like that—when you record those songs, then everyone wants you to play those songs.
On the day my album came out, I was in the Yorkville area, which was the Toronto equivalent of Haight-Asbury or the Village in New York, and was the center of the counterculture scene. This was at a time when free-form FM radio was really just taking off and all the stores in that area would listen to this particular radio station called CHUM. So I’m in a store and they were playing my music. No one knew me but I felt like I had a big finger pointing at me. It was terrifying.
So I left the store and went into a different store that had the same radio station on and they were playing the whole album. You could do that kind of thing back in those days. I felt like I would never have a sense of privacy again. It was a very excruciating experience and I felt I had to duck and hide.
April 15 2015 – In our current issue, Andy Whitman interviews legendary Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who is this year’s recipient of Image’s Levertov Award and will play a live concert on April 23, 2015 at 8:00 p.m. Read the full interview in issue 84.
Image: The late seventies and early eighties were a time of profound change for you. Looking back on that transformation, what advice would this newly enlightened Bruce Cockburn offer to the old Bruce Cockburn? And, turning it around, what cautions would the old Bruce Cockburn offer to the new Bruce Cockburn?
BC: The new Bruce Cockburn would say, “Lighten up,” and the old Bruce Cockburn would say, “How?” That’s the gist of the inner battle that was taking place.
I had a conversation at one point with an artist in Toronto whose studio space we were using. We were shooting a video, I think. We were chatting, and he said something like, “Having fun is what it’s all about, after all.” And I just looked at him like, “What?” “Well, isn’t it?” he said. And this other guy with a heavy German accent said, “We’re supposed to be having fun.”
It had never occurred to me that anything was supposed to be about having fun, other than very specific things like watching a movie.
At the time, my conclusion was that this was a worldview that this guy had embraced. And my worldview was about duty. It was not about fun at all; it was about doing what you were supposed to do. If I stepped back from the idea of duty, from the perhaps neurotic or unduly Victorian element of it, for me, life was ultimately about doing the next appropriate thing. Whether I thought of it is as duty or embracing the possibilities, appropriateness had a lot to do with it.
But being hung up on duty can interfere with your appreciation of the appropriateness of something that comes up spontaneously, and that would be a caution that the new Bruce would offer the old Bruce. The old Bruce would say, “It’s all about doing what you’re supposed to do. There’s a job to be done, and the job is to be the right kind of human being. People who have no moral base, or who don’t have one that I can see easily, are wasting their energy and time and pissing away their God-given talents and souls on having fun.” The new Bruce would say, “Yeah, but they’ve got something you don’t. They’re open to others and they can hear each other, and you’re not, and you can’t.”
Hi, As many of you know Bruce has been a supporter of the USC for many many years now. The USC has come up with a great program Celebrate Seeds. Here’s what the USC has to say about it. ~ Bernie Finkelstein
Feb 12, 2015 – It’s time to celebrate seeds! A medley of Canadian musicians and USC Canada are celebrating good seeds and everything they mean for human health, environmental protection and food security.
“Join the celebration! Watch this video to find out why I’m (we’re) celebrating seeds and farmers who save them. Let’s get the conversation rolling about this important food issue:
Seeds are important to me (us) because they are at the base of all of our food. Growing good food from good seeds helps to ensure that not only will crops to adapt and grow resiliencies, but they’ll also maintain biodiversity, flavour, abundance and choice. Learn more @USC Canada – Seeds of Survival and all the great benefits of good seeds.
Have you ever thought about where your food is coming from, not where you bought it or where it was physically grown, but where it REALLY comes from? Maybe it’s time that we all looked a little closer at where everything began. Human beings once used more than 7,000 different plant species to feed us. Today we rely on only 12 of them. Learn more about how to make a difference and join the celebration.
We’re celebrating seeds because of the power of their enormous diversity that is key to withstanding all kinds of shocks and changing conditions. We’re losing this diversity to uniformity. 75% of the global seed supply is controlled by only 10 companies. There are hundreds of rice varieties in the world but 65% of the rice we eat comes from only 4 varieties; 75% of the potatoes we eat come from just 4 varieties.
Find out more at http://bit.ly/1zgT6aQ
Jan 28, 2015 – The March 2015 issue of Acoustic Guitar will feature an excerpt from Bruce Cockburn’s new memoir, Rumours of Glory, in which the Canadian singer, songwriter, and guitarist talks about why, at 23, he left ’60s-era folk-rock to focus on solo acoustic music. He’d met fingerstyle guitarist Fox Watson, who taught Cockburn how to play in alternate tunings.
“I was sort of disdainful of open tunings back then because I didn’t like most of what people did with them—playing the same four chord formations in different tunings, trying for a specious variety in their sound without going to the trouble of actually learning their instrument,” Cockburn writes. “But when Fox played in any of several tunings he used, what came out was fluid as a mountain creek and agile as a gull.”
That was more than four decades ago. Since then, Cockburn has returned to playing electric guitar in rock bands, but he never left an acoustic guitar far behind, and he’s developed a style that is unmistakably his. In this special half-hour edition of Acoustic Guitar Sessions, senior editor Marc Greilsamer talks at length with Cockburn about his love of acoustic guitars and the singer-songwriter performs three tunes: the instrumental “Bohemian 3-Step,” “Waiting for a Miracle” and his most famous song, the politically fierce “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.”
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