by Brendan Burke – Peterborough Examiner

17 April 2022 – Acclaimed singer-songwriter and Canadian music icon Bruce Cockburn is many things. A skilled guitarist. A natural wordsmith and prolific lyricist. An experimenter of folk, rock, pop and jazz. A spiritually minded creative.

But if you ask the Ottawa-raised performer, he’ll likely tell you he’s merely a vessel: a man with a guitar trying his best to convey the human experience one melody at a time.

“An artist’s job is to distill what you can grasp from life into some communicable form and then share it with people; and life includes all of these different things: sex and politics and violence and love and the divine,” Cockburn said in a recent interview.

“I mean, it’s all in there, so why not sing about it?”

Now marking 50-plus years in the industry with an anniversary tour in Canada and the U.S. — including a stop at Peterborough’s Showplace Performance Centre on Tuesday — Cockburn is reflecting on his decades of work and his celebrated catalogue.

It all started with an old guitar. At the age of 14, Cockburn discovered the stringed instrument in his grandmother’s attic. He was transfixed. Already enamoured with early rock and roll, the avid sci-fi reader and lover of poetry put down his clarinet and picked up the guitar.

“I understood that whatever my life was going to be about, it was going to revolve heavily around the guitar,” Cockburn said. His parents supported his dreams — with a few conditions: take lessons and don’t grow sideburns or wear a leather jacket.

“I didn’t know if I had a knack for it or not. I just knew I wanted to do it and, in taking lessons, I progressed. By the end of high school, there was nothing else I wanted to do with my life except play guitar,” Cockburn recalled.

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Backstage with Douglas McLean

LISTEN: https://www.thesoundcafe.com/post/a-conversation-with-bruce-cockburn [scroll down!]

The Agenda with with Nam Kiwanuka

The Canadian music icon has been making music for most of his life, and there’s no sign of his slowing down. In fact, Cockburn is about to embark on the Ontario leg of his cross Canada and the U.S. tour. This feature interview touches on his music, and activism – both in the climate crisis and anti-war movements.

Credit: by Nam Kiwanuka on The Agenda with Steve Paikin – tvo.org

by Róisín West – Monitor Magazine

1 January 2022 – On the evening of June 26, 2002, activists and organizers from around the world settled into worn velvet seats of Calgary’s Uptown Cinema. This was the seventh day of non-violent protests against the G8 Kananaskis meetings, the first meetings of their kind to be held after 9/11. As the lights lowered, the concert organizer, Bourbon Tabernacle Choir’s Chris Brown, took to the stage. He was soon joined by the Brothers Creeggan of Barenaked Ladies fame and Bruce Cockburn. The Monitor recently reached out to Cockburn to discuss that concert and his lifetime of activism, catching up with him as he prepared to head out for his 2nd Attempt 50th anniversary Tour across the United States and Canada.

The Monitor: Music has always played a vital role in social justice movements. There are, of course, protest singers, like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, whose craft is centred around activism. But other artists like yourself and Tracy Chapman tend to weave social justice issues in as part of a broader tapestry. I’m wondering if you agree with that assessment and how you situate social justice within the landscape of your work?

Bruce Cockburn: Yeah, I do agree with that. I have not felt obliged to present myself or to try to create songs or a body of work that is focused on any one particular issue. I’ve always seen what I do as being about life in the broadest sense, whatever that means. And life in the broadest sense for me includes a moral consideration. I was raised to care about what happens to people around me, and the world in general, and to pay attention to it. And on top of that, adding the spiritual values that I have, including the notion of loving my neighbour. Well, you know, you can’t love your neighbour and ignore your own complicity in your neighbour’s pain. So that’s the starting point for my approach to those things, to songs that might be said to be about issues.

After that it’s circumstantial. I wrote the songs about Central America, which are the most blatant statements of that aspect of what I do, because I was there. I experienced the things I experienced and heard from other people about the things they were experiencing firsthand. Those things had an impact.

You only write your own feelings like that. I feel like that’s my job—to translate what I’ve experienced of life into something that’s communicable to everybody and can be shared by everybody. I’m always going to be writing from my perspective. And I think that in the case of the instances of injustice that I’ve mentioned in songs, those feelings would have been shared by any thinking person or feeling person in those circumstances.

So I feel like there’s something to share there [with people who] have not been in those circumstances or haven’t been exposed to those things. The songs are a way of kind of exposing and pointing a finger: there’s something you should look at.

I don’t feel like it’s my job to sell an idea to people, but I do feel that it’s appropriate to try to be persuasive. And in suggesting that people would probably feel the way I do it, if they were confronted with these things.

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