O Sun O Moon is scheduled for release on May 12, 2023
Listen to Us All
Bruce’s 38th studio album
by True North Records
O Sun O Moon is Cockburn’s latest studio album available May 12, 2023 from True North Records, a collection of 12 new original songs that demonstrate the songwriting and guitar-playing skills that come from more than 55 years of artistry. He has 22 gold and platinum records including a 6 times platinum record for his Christmas album. Cockburn continues to tour internationally.
Track Listing:
1. On a Roll
2. Orders
3. Push Come to Shove
4. Colin Went Down to the Water
5. Into the Now
6. Us All
7. To Keep the World We Know
8. King of the Bolero
9. When the Spirit Walks in the Room
10. Haiku
11. O Sun By Day O Moon By Night
12. When You Arrive
From the album O Sun O Moon – get it here: True North Records
Composer: Bruce Cockburn
Animation by Kurt Swinghammer
(c) Linus Entertainment Inc. Marketed by True North Records.
On Monday January 30, 2023, Bruce Cockburn performed at the historic Elsinore Theater in Salem, Oregon. Bruce came out using a walking stick and sat on a fleece covered stool that was flanked by guitars on the right and some percussion instruments on the left next to a cooler used for a foot stool. He began the show with an acoustic six string and began playing “After the Rain” from his 1979 release Dancing In The Dragons Jaws. “Night Train” from 1996’s The Charity of Night followed with its droning guitar providing the melodic beat that carried the chugging lyrics.
“Not a knife-throw from here you can hear the night-train passing.”
In 1999 Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu produced “The Last Night of the World” which Cockburn performed impeccably on his six-string singing about
“The radio playing Superchunk and the friends of Dean Martinez.” After the opening trio of songs Bruce began telling the audience about the popularity of Fidel Castro in Canada in the early days of his government. He explained that he and his brother would play Castro and Batista and Bruce would be Castro. This led to his interest in the Nicaraguan revolution of the 1970s which got him interested in Central America. His brother invited him to visit him to Guatemala while he was working for Oxfam, a Canadian relief organization. When Bruce visited his brother, the trip inspired him to write a number of songs for 1984’s Stealing Fire album including “Dust and Diesel.”
2017’s Bone on Bone included the comedic song, “3 Al Purdy’s” which Bruce explained was a documentary film project that he was asked to contribute a song to. Al Purdy was a Canadian poet and the song is about a street vendor selling three Al Purdy Chapbooks for twenty dollars. The song included Cockburn playing his mouth trumpet and was followed by him telling the crowd that this was part of the evening when you meditate as he re-tuned his guitar. He informed the guitar players in the audience that his tuning was DAD GAD which led to “Café Society” from the same album.
This is a new song from an album that will be coming out in May called “Orders” he announced. The lyrics are spiritually charged which is one of the qualities of all Bruce’s music that draws people to it.
“A challenge great—but as I recall
Our orders said to love them all.”
“Strange Waters” is a killer song from The Charity of Night that is a reworking of the 23rd Psalm. Instead of “the Lord leading me besides still waters” the path leads to “Strange Waters.” Bruce told the crowd that he would be back after he took a short break. The second set began when Bruce returned twenty minutes later and picked up his resonator guitar for an instrumental titled “The End of All Rivers,” from 2005’s Speechless album.
He introduced another song from the new album titled “When the Spirit Walks into the Room” performed with the resonator guitar.
“You’re a thread upon the loom
When the Spirit walks in the room.”
After changing guitars back to acoustic six string he dove into “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” from Stealing Fire as the crowd roared with approval. Bruce did a couple of extended guitar solos demonstrating his mastery of the instrument. Bruce told the crowd that this was the second attempt at the 50th anniversary tour that didn’t happen in 2020; (his eponymous first solo album was released in 1970.) “I’m going way back to an older song” Cockburn announced as he changed guitars to a twelve string and began “In the Falling Dark,” the title song from his 1976 album. The album was the first after he experienced a spiritual epiphany and became a “born again” Christian which led him to explore his faith through his compositions.
Keeping the twelve string Bruce began “Stolen Land” and played an amazing solo that the audience went nuts over clapping enthusiastically. After changing back to the six-string guitar he said “here’s another really old song that pre-dates the fifty years. It came from the 1960’s which he called mystical times and then stated that “the 1950’s sucked but had good music with Little Richard and Elvis.” “Let Us Go Laughing” appeared on “High Winds, White Sky” his second album released in 1971. It’s a gentle mellow song with an intricate guitar solo followed by an up-tempo conclusion.
“Wondering Where the Lions Are” from Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws drew enthusiastic cheers and clapping as Bruce began one of his most popular songs. The crowd sang along in a call and response on the chorus singing the second verse to his lead. Cockburn told the crowd “you sound beautiful when you sing.” The last song of the set was “If a Tree Falls” from his 1988 album, Big Circumstance. The song is an up-tempo guitar driven excursion into an ecological view of the earth that ended to thunderous applause and screaming as Bruce left the stage.
The crowd’s enthusiasm brought Cockburn back out with two other people. After picking up his twelve-string guitar he introduced Inger Nova Jorgensen on vocals and Jeff Pevar on resonator guitar and vocals. “Five Fifty-One” from 2011’s Small Source of Comfort had Cockburn and Pevar exchanging licks and all three singing in harmony.
“Middle of the night cops come knocking on my door
Still don’t know what my neighbor went and called them for.”
The night concluded with another song from the upcoming album called “Into the Now.” When the trio concluded and took a final bow, they ended the two-hour performance that met the audience’s expectations.
Saskatchewan Weekend with Shauna Powers – CBC
Bruce Cockburn reflects on over 50 years in music
29 January 2023 – Many of us have loved the music of Bruce Cockburn for decades, and his earlier tunes still stand the test of time. They’re sometimes angry, like If I Had a Rocket Launcher, sometimes intimate, like Wondering Where the Lions Are. And they’re almost always poetic. Cockburn had to delay his 50th anniversary tour because of the pandemic, but he’s on the road now and that brings him to Saskatoon on February 9th. Host Shauna Powers speaks to Bruce about the path that brought him to this moment.
13 January 2023 – Fifty-five years into a career that has earned him superstar status in Canada, singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn is in a reflective mood. In November, he released Rarities, a digital collection of songs previously available only in his very limited-edition Rumours of Glory box set, plus four tracks plucked from tribute compilations and remastered, one very early demo (“Bird Without Wings,” from 1966) and a track heard only on the Japanese version of Life Short Call Now (“ Twilight On the Champlain Sea,” featuring Ani DiFranco). He also reissued audiophile-quality editions of his self-titled 1970 debut album, 1996’s Charity of Night and 1999’s Breakfast In New Orleans, Dinner In Timbuktu.
The San Francisco resident, 77, also became a U.S. citizen in November, a development he calls “quite exciting.” (His wife and 11-year-old daughter are American-born.) In January, he’s kicking off another tour, during which he’ll likely perform tracks from an album he just finished recording. He plans to release the still-untitled work sometime in 2023.
BGS: So what prompted the Rarities release now?
Cockburn: It just seemed like a good time. When my book [the 2014 memoir, Rumours of Glory] came out, we put together a 10-CD box set with all the songs discussed in the book. And there was one disc of rarities. This record is basically the same record, except there’s a couple of extra songs, and there were only 1,000 copies of that box made, so the idea was to get these obscure things — some go back to the ‘60s even, so that is historical stuff, and some live performances and some film music that was never released elsewhere — into wider circulation.
Bird Without Wings
On “Bird Without Wings,” I was struck by the self-doubt of some of the lyrics, which doesn’t surprise me in someone’s early work. I wonder if you would still write a song like that today?
That’s an interesting question. Probably not, not exactly that. I mean, I recognize the person. But my life has been through a lot of changes since then. Back then it was so personal, I hardly ever sang it in public. But a band called 3’s a Crowd recorded it. I didn’t particularly like their version; it was a little too processed for my tastes. That album was produced by Mama Cass and I’m assuming she applied the techniques that the Mamas & the Papas used to get their harmonies, and it might have suited them, but it didn’t really work with that band. In my view, anyway.
You bring up an interesting point regarding how you feel when somebody records your song. Some artists are like, how I feel about it is how big the checks are when they arrive.
Well, that’s a factor, too. It’s not a simple thing. They were more or less friends of mine, so it was a bit awkward. They may have felt that I was less their friend after they heard what I thought of their version, but I wouldn’t be as bothered now, either. When I wrote that song, I’d probably just turned 21. As well as being too personal to sing for people, it was so personal that any sort of departure from my concept of how the song should sound was really hard to deal with. That’s not the case now. I have opinions about different people’s versions of my stuff, but I’ve heard a lot more things happen to my songs since then. Some better, some worse. I’d be more charitable now.
When Folk Alliance International gave you its inaugural People’s Voice Award — created to recognize “an individual who unabashedly embraces social and political commentary in their creative work and public career” — in 2017, you noted it was the first honor you received in the United States. It seems like acknowledgement in this country has been uneven for you.
Yeah. There’s an audience that allows me to tour. But I mean, we had significant radio play in the ‘80s (with) “Wondering Where the Lions Are” and “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” and other songs; as long as it was triple-A radio, my records got played. To the extent that there are some of those stations left, and sometimes on certain shows on public radio, I’ll show up. But it’s certainly not what it once was. I think that it’s partly being not from here. If I were in the pop world, that wouldn’t be an issue because it’s all global. But in the more esoteric area that I operate in, that’s made a difference. The profile in Canada is a lot higher.
But every now and then. … We’re in the process of making a new album, which we recorded at (producer) Colin Linden’s studio in Nashville. I had shipped a bunch of gear there and went to the depot to pick it up. There’s a young woman doing the paperwork, and the supervisor comes by and he looks at the name on that paperwork and he looks at me and he goes, “You’re Bruce Cockburn?” So he turns to all these people in the office, and he’s going, “You gotta hear this guy! He’s one of the greatest musicians in the world!” It was a lovely feeling to hear somebody getting so enthusiastic about it. For me, in this country, that’s quite rare.
Does that ever get old?
Are you kidding? I mean, if people are importuning you because they want something, that gets old fast. But the fact that people are appreciating what they know of what I do? That’s a wonderful thing.
Here’s a quote from the story I wrote about your Folk Alliance award. “When he became known as a political writer, as opposed to previous tags of Christian writer or ‘the John Denver of Canada,’ [Cockburn] said, ‘I had not thought much about the effect of the political aspect of my songwriting; I’d always felt, and I still do, that the job is to tell the truth of the human experience as we live it. I’ve never been interested in protest for its own sake, or in ideological polemicizing. Just fucking tell it like you see it and feel it. If you don’t see it and feel it, write about something else. Songs need to come from the heart or they don’t count for much.’”
It seems like it should go without saying, but it apparently doesn’t.
As somebody who has written political songs, do you feel like those songs still have an impact, or can still have an impact?
Well, they do, in a limited way — assuming that it’s a good song to begin with; that it has something about it that people are going to be tweaked by. It really depends on the fertility of the field on which it falls. If there’s a body of public sentiment around an issue, and a song touches on that, and speaks to that, it will have an effect on people. It’ll help maybe reinforce their feelings and their willingness to get involved, or it may provide a kind of rallying point. But without that, it has no power. It’s really about the people more than the song. But there’s no question that a song like “We Shall Overcome” became an anthem that moved a lot of people who maybe wouldn’t have been so moved were they not invited to sing along with a song like that.
In this era, it’s harder to imagine something like that happening, and I think we’re worse off for it. But what’s your impression as the person on stage or in the studio, or in the room with the pen and paper?
I don’t know. You quoted me there and I kind of stand by that. I think it’s always worth doing. If you see yourself as an artist in the broadest sense, or maybe in the classical sense, let’s say, someone who practices an art as opposed to somebody who gets on TV — not that you can’t be both — but if you see yourself that way, it’s just the job. Sing about what you’re moved by, what you see around you and feel around you and feel coming at you.
For me, the elements of that change with passage of time. But I’m still pretty much the person that I started out being, at the core. I’ve always been playing to a minority audience because of that, and I think that’s what anybody who’s trying to do something real should expect. Once in a while, somebody doing something real cracks through, or there’s a window that opens in terms of the public and the media’s willingness to expose stuff that doesn’t conform to the norm. But those windows are usually not open for long.
Let’s talk about the new album. Anything you want to tell me about the songs you’re writing today?
There’s a lot of spiritual content — not explicitly Christian, although I consider myself a Christian. But I think the impulse to experience something on the spiritual level is universal, and more power to anybody that can go there. That’s partly a reflection of age, too; these are concerns that are larger than some other ones at this point in my life. But there are songs that have topical content; there’s a song called “To Keep the World We Know,” about global warming, that I’ve co-written with an Inuit artist, Susan Aglukark, a Juno Award-winning Canadian. But mostly, they’re personal, which is typical of me.
What about the three rereleases? Why those?
It was the 50th anniversary of True North. It was my 50th anniversary as a recording artist and my first album was the first album on True North Records. So they put out a commemorative thing. This is a better-sounding pressing. And then to go along with that, those two albums from the ‘90s are ones that I particularly like as an example of what I do. Those albums have never been on vinyl. That was the exciting part; there’s something really nice about vinyl. Not just the sound but the tactile thing, the big-format cover and all that.
There’s a couple of songs that are obscure; “Grinning Moon” would have fit on those ‘90s albums. I’m not really sure why it wasn’t included, but I think it’s a pretty good song. There’s another called “Come Down Healing” that includes verses that were recycled into other songs on Charity of Night. There was something about the song that didn’t work for me at the time, but when I listen to it now, it’s pretty good. I like the idea of these being out there and not being completely lost.
That gorgeous guitar intro on “Grinning Moon” really grabbed me. And on “Come Down Healing,” the imagery, the guitar work and the urgency — and I love the lyrics: “Sometimes darkness is your friend”; “On the seven cooling towers of the cancer apocalypse/on the 7 billion dreaming souls.” And to think that you’ve had that song around for this long and it still feels current and important.
This shit doesn’t go away.
That’s why we need people like you, to make sure we know.
Having sold more than nine million albums worldwide, acclaimed songwriter, performer, author, and activist Bruce Cockburn is a member of both the Canadian Songwriter and Canadian Music Hall of Fame, a winner of Folk Alliance’s People’s Voice Award, as well 13 JUNO Awards.
Bruce Cockburn has written almost 400 songs. Released 34 albums over a 50 year span. Who better to gather up his rarities and present them as partners with his hits? The man has rarities.
For more album info go here, Rarities.
Ep 235 | Rarities – Bruce Cockburn. A life in Music
Having sold more than nine million albums worldwide, acclaimed songwriter, performer, author and activist Bruce Cockburn is a member of both the Canadian Songwriter and Canadian Music Hall of Fame, a winner of Folk Alliance’s People’s Voice Award, as well 13 JUNO Awards from more than 30 nominations.
WATERDOWN ON – On Rarities, Bruce Cockburn is finally sharing twelve rarely heard recordings with digital music consumers that were previously only available within the Rumours of Glory limited-edition box set, along with four remastered tracks that appeared on tribute compilation albums dedicated to Gordon Lightfoot, Pete Seeger, Mississippi Sheiks and Mississippi John Hurt. Released on True North Records, Rarities will be available on November 25, 2022, on all digital platforms including Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music and Deezer. An advance single, the theme song from the 1983 Bill Mason-directed National Film Board film, Waterwalker, is available to stream now, along with pre-order and pre-save links for the digital album, and details on the musicians, studios, producers and recording dates for the tracks, all of which can be found here.
Bruce Cockburn – Rarities – Track Listing:
Juan Carlos Theme
Waterwalker Theme
Avalon, My Home Town
Wise Users
Going Down The Road
The Whole Night Sky (Alternate Version)
Grinning Moon
Song For Touring Around The Stars
Come Down Healing
Mystery Walk
The Trains Don’t Run Here Anymore (Re-Mastered)
Ribbon Of Darkness (Re-Mastered)
Turn, Turn, Turn (Re-Mastered)
Honey Babe Let The Deal Go Down (Re-Mastered)
Twilight on the Champlain Sea featuring Ani DiFranco
Bird Without Wings
Also found on Rarities are two songs not on the original limited-edition CD, Rumours of Glory: “Twilight On The Champlain Sea” featuring Ani DiFranco, originally intended to be on Life Short Call Now and used on the Japan-only release, and 1966’s “Bird Without Wings,” the oldest Cockburn demo from his personal vault, later recorded by Ottawa’s 3’s A Crowd and produced by The Mamas & the Papas’ Mama Cass.
On the same day as the Rarities album is released, Cockburn and True North Records are releasing three albums on 180g black vinyl – 1996’s Charity of Night, 1999’s Breakfast In New Orleans Dinner In Timbuktu and the 1970 debut album Bruce Cockburn, all of which can also be pre-ordered here.
For further information, contact: USA – Mark Pucci – Mark@markpuccimedia.com
Canada & ROW – Eric Alper eric@truenorthrecords.com
Bruce Cockburn & Ticket Links – http://brucecockburn.com
An Interview with Bruce Cockburn – Mockingbird Magazine by BEN SELF
19 May 2022 – The following appears in the Success & Failure issue of The Mockingbird magazine.
Despite growing up in what he calls “a typical 1950s Canadian middle class household” in suburban Ottawa, Bruce Cockburn has done his share of wandering. He first became a star in the Canadian music scene in the early 1970s, winning the JUNO for Folksinger of the Year three years running. In 1974, he converted to Christianity and went on to release several albums with overtly religious themes. Among the best of these was In the Falling Dark (1976), which includes stirring songs of faith like “Lord of the Starfields” and “Festival of Friends.” While he never quite embraced the label of a “Christian” musician, and has often struggled with the legalism and reactionary politics of much organized religion, the push-and-pull of Christian faith has remained a central thread in Cockburn’s work and life.
Following the dissolution of his first marriage the in the late 70s, Cockburn made a conscious decision to “embrace human society” and moved to Toronto, Canada’s largest city. His musical style soon became heavier and grittier, and his lyrics darker and more politically-charged. He was also deeply impacted by his travels abroad, especially an intense Oxfam-led trip to Central America in 1983. These influences culminated in a “North-South trilogy” of albums that included the bracing hit Stealing Fire (1984), which featured two of his career’s biggest singles: “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” and “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”
After an exhausting decade that ended in a period of writer’s block, Cockburn reinvented himself again in the 1990s, shifting back to more acoustic, introspective material. His output from the period included deeply meditative albums like The Charity of Night (1997), which captures the world-weary wisdom of middle-age in songs like “Pacing the Cage” and the final track “Strange Waters.” The latter, for example, functions like a grungy, latter-day psalm:
You’ve been leading me
Beside strange waters
Streams of beautiful lights in the night
But where is my pastureland in these dark valleys?
If I loose my grip, will I take flight?
Now in his mid-seventies and settled in San Francisco, Cockburn is still asking the deep questions and watching for those “inexorable promptings” of the Spirit, or what he sometimes calls “Big Circumstance.”[1] To the delight of his fans, he continues to tour and release new studio albums, including the soulful Bone On Bone (2017), for which he won his 13th JUNO award, and the rich instrumental album Crowing Ignites (2019). Below he shares about both his musical and his religious journeys, his complicated relationship to success, along with insights on the creative process, and much more.
JUNE 6, 2022
BY ANDREA BEENHAM
Players: Bruce Cockburn – vocals, guitar, dulcimer, percussion
Legendary Canadian singer-songwriter-guitarist and distinguished humanitarian Bruce Cockburn did not disappoint at the San Luis Obispo stop of his COVID-postponed 50th Anniversary tour. Arriving on stage to a standing ovation of passionate fans, the 77-year-old delivered an impeccable two-hour show that included favorites from his more than 25 studio albums, as well as songs from his forthcoming record, some of which were released online during the lockdown.
The evening included ethereal guitar work, traditional folk sounds, and elements of rock and blues, opening with 2019’s “Sweetness and Light,” a gentle, captivating instrumental that highlighted Cockburn’s gracious, unassuming persona. Shifting to his trademark poetic stories of deep unconditional love and humanitarianism, he followed up with “When You Give It Away” –with poetic lyrics including “time goes fast, but learning goes slow”—and “Tropic Moon,” inspired by the Salvadorian guerilla movement of the 1980s, highlighted by the phrase “should be a cry of love, but it’s a cry of fright.”
The lilting, bluesy roots jam “Café Society” poked fun at the ritual gossipy morning cup of joe, while “Pacing The Cage” delivered a gentle lullaby feel with amazing loving energy. A true showman, Cockburn added in wind chimes (kicking them as he strummed the guitar and sang) on “States I’m In,” and delivered gorgeous vocals on “Last Night of the World” with the hook “If this were the last night of the world, what would I do? What would I do that was different? –unless it was champagne with you.”
Says Cockburn, “The songs don’t really come alive until you play them for people, so the recording studio is a sort of compromise in that regard. I like being in the studio. It’s fun. It’s like putting a puzzle together or something, but it’s a very different kind of experience than performing a song in front of a bunch of people. That’s when the songs really assume their proper life.”
After over an hour, Cockburn took a short intermission, continuing on with eastern-influenced, “Stolen Land,” his lament for the theft of land and racism experienced by the First Nations, dramatized by falsetto vocals in unison with the chorus guitar lines. He remained unflappable as someone shouted out that the crowd in the room was on stolen land, pausing only to briefly highlight, wryly, that it was a fact across the country, except for the City of Manhattan, which was “purchased.” “In The Falling Dark” brought heavy-strummed tones that resolved with gentle, melodic lines like “smoke on the breeze, eyes that sting.” Cockburn, like fellow Canadian musician-songwriter peers Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen—and Bob Dylan, born just across the border—is a poet.
In his second set, Cockburn introduced new song, “Into The Now” (written during his stay in Maui in July 2001), that includes the lyrics, “love trickles down like honey from God,” and played the dulcimer for “Arrows of Light,” before engaging the crowd in a rousing call-and-response rendition of “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” sparking a beautiful communal moment. Cockburn’s incredible falsetto and breath control reminded the audience of the strength and power of love in any circumstance with “Lovers In A Dangerous Time,” and his closing song, “If A Tree Falls,” an anthem about human destruction of the natural environment, delivered with breathtaking guitar work and vocals, was absolutely stunning.
Clearly in his element on the stage, Cockburn returned for a three-song encore, donning his dobro, and adding more wind chimes and fabulous echoplex pedal work with eloquent delays on “The End of All Rivers.” He followed the moving instrumental soundscape with his straight-up old school blues tune, “Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long.”
Focusing on writing and recording during lockdown brought forth ten new songs, four of them released on YouTube last year as a means of sharing them with fans. Cockburn performed two pieces from the “Four New Songs” collection, including “Orders”—with its haunting guitar refrain and magnetic, soothing storytelling that held the crowd captive—and “Us All,” the latter closing the evening’s encore with patient, masterly delivery. “I didn’t want to wait,” said Cockburn, “because a couple of those songs seem pertinent to the current situation, so I wanted to get them out there in the world before we were able to go in and do a whole album.”
Throughout the evening, Cockburn (pronounced co-burn) engaged the audience with dry comedic wit between pure, beautiful guitar playing, layered with his indelible observations and experience of the world. Cockburn is committed to the idea of creating some sort of common space through the magic of music, rather than perpetuating narratives of divisive conviction. The truth of his words is poignant and meaningful, while his grounded, easy presence and the performance itself create a safe, healing space. Being back on the road is what it is all about for him. “Doing something that we weren’t able to do for so long, that sense of joyous relief, is characteristic of all the shows,” he says.
While many musicians have paid homage to his brilliant writing—including The Barenaked Ladies, Judy Collins, Jimmy Buffett, The Jerry Garcia Band, and Steve Bell—Cockburn says that a couple of interpretations of his music stand out. The first is that of Jimmy Buffet. “[He] really went out of his way to do them in the way they were intended to be,” says Cockburn. The second is that of Michael Occhipinti, a jazz guitarist from Toronto, who took the time to deconstruct Cockburn’s writing and rework it as a jazz album. “It’s a beautiful record,” Cockburn says.
When asked about his thoughts on the current state of music, Cockburn shared that he feels we are in for some new sounds. “Every now and then, when you reach that point where the basic sound of pop music becomes the basic sound of commercials, It’s ripe for some new thing to come along and the window is down for about five minutes. Some really great stuff will show up, and then the windows start to close again because it’ll get refined and they’ll figure out how to package it.”
Cockburn’s new album is anticipated in early 2023.
Singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn talks about Christianity and what he’s dropping from his setlist
by Bill Forman May 11, 2022
When it comes to live shows, Bruce Cockburn has no shortage of songs to draw upon. There are the ‘80s hits like “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” and “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” the steady stream of albums that have followed in their wake (which have earned him ten Juno Awards in his native Canada), and a few unreleased songs he’ll be debuting on his current tour.
Bruce Cockburn 13May 2022 MIM Theatre Phoenix – photo Joe Mead
But one hit that Cockburn won’t be playing is “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” a song he wrote after visiting Guatemalan refugee camps back in 1984. It was Cockburn’s best-known hit in America, as well as his most controversial, with an accompanying video that depicted the genocide carried out against Indian villagers by the Guatemalan army, with whom the CIA happened to have close ties.
While MTV aired the music video frequently, radio programmers were less inclined to add the single to their playlists, not least because of its closing line: “If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die.”
The song has long been a staple of Cockburn’s live shows, but that changed back in March when Russia fired more than 30 cruise missiles at a Ukrainian military base.
“I’d been playing it on all the U.S. dates, but stopped during the Canadian shows, because I just felt like it’s gone too far that way,” says Cockburn. “It’s always made me uncomfortable when people cheer for that song. And I don’t mean applause at the end of it because it was a good performance or something. But just when I sing the various lines — like even at the end of the first verse, ‘If I have a rocket launcher, I’d make somebody pay’ — and there’s invariably somebody — some male — in the audience that hollers out, ‘YEAAHHH!’ And I hate that, because that’s not what it’s about. And if they were thinking about what they were hearing, they would not do that. And I just didn’t want to play into that kind of sentiment in the current situation.”
I think my relationship with God is the most important thing in my life.
— Bruce Cockburn
This isn’t the first time that Cockburn felt the need to give the song a rest. “The same thing happened after 9/11,” he says. “I didn’t sing it for a long time after that, because, you know, people were just looking for motivation to go out and do really bad things. Not that anybody in my immediate audience is likely to go do that, but it just was playing into the wrong part of the heart.”
While Cockburn has written numerous songs about human rights violations and third-world exploitation, he’s always done so with a poetic sensibility, and a depth of emotion, that sets him apart from more didactic political songwriters. He’s also a phenomenal guitarist, which is particularly evident on a pair of instrumental albums that prompted Acoustic Guitar magazine to place him on the same level as Django Reinhardt, Bill Frisell, and Mississippi John Hurt.
“When I was learning to fingerpick, I did my best to emulate Mississippi John Hurt and Mance Lipscomb, and some other guys like that,” says Cockburn. “Brownie McGhee was also an influence. I saw Brownie and Sonny [Terry] play dozens of times at this club in Ottawa that I hung out at on a regular basis. Well, probably it wasn’t dozens of times, but it might have been, because they’d come a couple of times a year. I love that music, and it’s still part of what I do.”
Cockburn was 14 years old when he found the dusty old guitar in his grandmother’s attic that would put him on the path to a life in music. Another pivotal moment, he says, was dropping out of Berklee College of Music.
“I was headed toward a bachelor’s degree in music, which would have entitled me to teach music in high schools, which I had no interest whatsoever in doing,” he says. “I was interested in the content of what was being taught, but not in terms of using it as a teaching career. And then I reached the point where I had this realization, ‘I gotta get out of here, this is not where I’m supposed to be.’ And I listened to that, and I acted on it.”
The other primary influence on Cockburn’s life has been his spiritual beliefs, which find their way into his lyrics without hitting you over the head with them.
“I think my relationship with God is the most important thing in my life, and the one I sort of struggle with the most probably too,” he says. “I wasn’t plugged into a community for a very long time, but through a combination of circumstances in San Francisco, I started going to church again after having not done it for maybe 30 years, 40 years. It was a small, non-denominational church with all these really accepting and loving people. The congregation was racially mixed — you know, people from all sorts of Asian extraction, African-Americans, white Texans, and Samoans — all kinds of different cultures mixed there. And it was accepting of gays and, you know, whatever else — people that feel, as I do, that their relationship with God is of paramount importance.
“When I showed up, they didn’t know who I was. I was just the old guy with an attractive wife, who’d discovered the church before I did, and eventually persuaded me to go. Then they found out I played guitar, and I ended up sitting in with the band and becoming more or less their guitarist. But then COVID, of course, killed that. So new things have happened since, but there was definitely a sense of community.”
All of which is a far cry from the divisive preachings — or, as Cockburn puts it, the vile bullshit — that comes out of the religious right.
“If you start using the Christian faith as a reason to hate people, it’s completely antithetical to what it’s about,” he says. ”And yet, historically, of course, it has been used for that over and over again.
“But, you know, I don’t think anybody who pays attention to what I have to say is gonna confuse me with that other stuff. The challenge, of course, is will they listen to what I have to say, or just write me off? Either way, I’m not gonna stop calling myself a Christian. And if you can’t deal with it, well, that’s your problem.”
