Bruce Cockburn

Kicking at the Darkness

Photo by Daniel Keebler

“For 50 years, this Canadian musical legend has been capturing in song the essence of human experience — while fiercely striving to make it better.

One of Canada’s finest artists, Bruce Cockburn has enjoyed an illustrious career shaped by politics, spirituality, and musical diversity. His remarkable journey has seen him embrace folk, jazz, rock and worldbeat styles while travelling to such far-flung places as Guatemala, Mali, Mozambique and Nepal, and writing memorable songs about his ever-expanding world of wonders.

“My job,” Bruce explains, “Is to try and trap the spirit of things in the scratches of pen on paper and the pulling of notes out of metal.”

Bruce’s songs of romance, protest and spiritual discovery are among the best to have emerged from Canada over the last 50 years. His guitar playing, both acoustic and electric, has placed him in the company of the world’s top instrumentalists. And he remains deeply respected for his activism on issues from native rights and land mines to the environment and Third World debt, working for organizations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Friends of the Earth.”

This is just a short version of Bruce’s expansive bio. I’ve always been a fan and can’t remember when there wasn’t Bruce in my musical sphere, going back to the early 70s growing up in Canada. He was a mainstay and often on the radio. So, it was with great pleasure that I was able to catch up recently with Bruce on the phone from San Francisco where he lives with his beautiful family.

“On a Roll” from Bruce’s latest album, “O Sun O Moon (2023)”

I met Bruce about 30 years ago when Bruce was mixing his The Charity of Night album at Daniel Lanois’ studio in New Orleans. I asked him for his impression of how time passes — how things evolve and how people now maybe feel completely different... or are they the same?

Bruce says, “Time passes, there’s no question about that. For me, the older I get the more I’m inclined to be reminded by happenstance, by things I encounter, of the distant past. Most of my life I’ve not been inclined to look back much or forward. I tend to look at where I am most of the time.

At this point in my life, there are a lot more connections… [there are] both pleasant and unpleasant memories, ways in which something really worked, or they really didn’t. It’s not like stock-taking, I don’t think. It’s not like I’m not measuring ‘where has this all brought me to,’ it’s just that the imagery is there and it’s interesting, in a way, because there are regrets and there are things that I’ve never allowed myself to feel much pride in what I do. It’s more about just getting it right. But looking back there are certain things I feel proud of. I listen to an old album, one of the early ones, this is going back 50 years, and that wasn’t so bad. We did a good thing there. With those things, especially listening to the music, it’s like looking through an album of photographs that takes you back to where you were when you made those recordings.”

I’ve been aware of Bruce as an artist since the early 70s and I include him on my short list of great singer-songwriters that Canada has produced over the past 50-60 years along with Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Stompin’ Tom Connors. The thing about Bruce’s work for me is that stands out in many ways as deeper or sometimes even darker than the rest.

I was curious about the way Bruce views art. Is art reflection of our times? Is it observant? Or maybe, is art a universe unto its own, such as that created by Johann Sebastian Bach who created his own little universe outside of current comings and goings.

Bruce said: “Whatever I’ve done in that sense hasn’t been very intentional. It’s not like I ignore where I am in the middle of things or my relationship to what’s around me… I don’t think I’m operating in my own solitary universe, but neither am I part of a scene, and I don’t feel I’ve ever been really part of a scene. That’s probably not been a good thing because I think that people who are part of scenes are more likely to being heard by more people. In the end it is what it is, and it’s certainly worked out for me.”

After a bit of a hiatus from writing, O Sun O Moon, Bruce’s most recent album, was released in 2023. To me, there is something very introspective and poignant about it.

Bruce says: “For me, writing has always been like a biological urge. The creative urge is comparable to the digestive process. You take in information, experiences and after a while something has to come out. What comes out is a song.”

Bruce continues: “For me, the book was a different issue. That was far more intentional, a thought-out process, and a laborious process, than song writing tends to involve. But it comes when it comes. Over the years, the pace has slowed down. The distribution deal we had with Columbia Records in Canada in the 70s called for an album in a year and I had no trouble coming up with an album a year during that period. As time went on, things got bigger in scope, travel-wise, etc. There was less time to sit around and cogitate and absorb things and a lot of experiences, so the pace of song writing slowed down as the pace of touring increased and other kinds of travel. As time went on, too, with age, everything goes slower than it used to. I don’t put pressure on myself to come up with stuff, but so far, things have kept coming.”

“The inspiration has to be there or otherwise you come up with something that will sound processed,” says Bruce.

Whenever I hear Bruce’s music, I feel it comes from a purer place (not good or better). It feels pure to me. Whenever I hear his songs, I always think it’s a true voice of something internal coming through.

Bruce says, “I hope for that because for me the whole fact that I’m able to base a life around doing this is a huge gift. The gift carries with it an invitation to share it. The way to share it is to put the songs out there for people to hear them. It’s about a relationship with the universe, in my frame of reference, with God. To me the song writing process, no matter the topic… all of those are expressions with God/the Universe. If there is a sense of purity, perhaps it comes from that. That is the one intention that I do go into it with, which is a general one, that the songs generally reflect or spring from that relationship and, therefore, reflect it to some degree. What other people get out of it is another issue. Everybody has their own take on these things. People receive a song through the filter of their own experience, taste, etc. But that’s not my responsibility. My job is to try to make them [the songs] as good as I can and put them out there.”

“Colin Went Down to the Water” from “O Sun O Moon” (2023)

Bruce talks about the song: “This song hasn’t been talked about much in interviews around the album. I wrote the song in Maui, Hawaii. Colin is a friend; someone I knew from San Francisco who had moved to Maui. He had a drinking problem and some issues but was a really good guy. But because of his issues, I was hesitating about calling him. So, I called him. At one point there was a message from him that I didn’t listen to. We spoke, this was on a Thursday, and planned to get together for a drink the following week. On Saturday we got a phone call from another friend in San Francisco who also was friends with Colin in San Francisco, with the news that Colin had drowned. He was a scuba diver and a techno guy, some kind of programming guy, I’m not sure of his exact job. He was a guitar player, singer and a tech guy. But he was a big fan of scuba diving and wanted to get into that industry and he had just had a toehold in it when COVID came along and everything that was tourist-related shut down. So that didn’t work out for him too well, but he was surviving up to this point but then on a dive he disappeared, and they found him a day later on the bottom, in the ocean. They were free diving off the shore. It was shocking news. The song is basically about that. After we heard this news, I went back to the message he had left that I had not heard. He said “Bruce, Colin here. Welcome to heaven.” That was the message. It was this huge thing in an otherwise extremely peaceful and reflective atmosphere… It was in the middle of one of those creative rushes … where you’re all of a sudden writing a bunch of stuff. One of these songs that came out was Colin Went Down to the Water.”

“When You Arrive” from “O Sun O Moon” (2023)

We began by talking about the third verse:

“You're limping like a three-legged canine
Backbone creaking like a cheap shoe
Dragging the accretions of a lifetime
But you oughta make another mile or two.”

Bruce says: “It’s pretty autobiographical. It’s a kind of happy song about death. People who know the album will know that it closes the album. I thought it would make a pretty good singalong. All the people whose voices appear on the album are on that song and it builds as it fades out with repetitions of the chorus with more and more voices. Live, people have been willing to sing along with it. It’s a fantastic feeling to have that song as a singalong.”

Bruce says: “Early on it wanted to be a song about forgiveness, about accommodation and about forbearance. We are all under various kinds of pressure — and a lot of it -— to be as fragmented as we can be as a culture, as a society. This is a deplorable state, I think, and it serves no good purpose. The idea was ‘here we are’ and the list is basically just a list of all sorts of people around whom this issue might arise for any of us, some people we envy, some people we despise and everything in between. It's an invitation to empathize with each other and it is the essence of the Christian message, which is about love. If you are actively trying to love your neighbour, then you have to find ways of dealing with the things you don’t care for and that don’t involve violence and hatred. What is that? I don’t know the answers to all of that but that’s where the song is going.”

I guess the magic word is empathy. It doesn’t mean you have to like what someone is saying or doing but if you can get inside their head and understand where they’re coming from…. I have this conversation quite often. I remember watching Roger Waters on a French program when Trump got elected in 2016 and the interviewer asked him what he thought about the new US President and Roger said he could empathize with the people who voted for him. He said it’s not a very popular stance to take but I understand why — it doesn’t mean I like it or agree with them but to vilify those people and treat them as if they are the other is doing exactly what you don’t want to be doing.”

Bruce replies: “Nobody’s the ‘other,’ and the tendency to make people the other comes largely from a sense of ourselves as the ‘other.’ We hide things from ourselves and project them on the people we’re looking at. It’s easier to blame people for the things you find uncomfortable than it is to look hard at why you find them uncomfortable. It’s a human trait that we do this. Coming from somewhere or other, that tendency is being exploited and amplified currently and I think we really need to resist it.

The important thing is to listen to each other and to listen to the voice of your own heart. That can be very challenging in a culture that is based on noise. But that’s what we have to do.”

I ended my talk with Bruce by talking about his song, If I Had a Rocket Launcher, which I have given very heavy airplay on my radio show. I’m very focused on certain contemporary issues. One of them is the ongoing conflict in Gaza. I asked Bruce to talk about violence versus peaceful change.

Bruce says: “It is not an exhortation to go out and kill Guatemalan soldiers. The main part of the journey was to spend time in Nicaragua. We started in Mexico City and then a couple of informal Guatemalan refugee camps in the south of Mexico. That’s where the song came from. The people in those camps had been subjected to the most horrendous acts of violence possible. They were survivors of those things and dislocated and hungry with no prospects and they were still subjected to attacks from Guatemala from time to time even though they were on the other side of the border in Mexico. There was this incredible contrast between the outrageous experiences they had suffered and the dignity and the kind of poignancy of their situation. I say ‘dignity’ because they would tell these horrible, horrible stories in the calmest way and they had kept their social structure together. They were not desperate in terms of their sense of who they were. They were doing as well as anybody could with the fact that they were dislocated but they were in these terrible situations facing starvation and unable to return home because of the war.”

Bruce continues: “What triggered the central image of the song was a helicopter that you could hear from one these camps that was only a few hundred meters from the border. You could hear the helicopter going back and forth along the border throughout the days we were there. From time to time, it was known that what had happened the week before we were there, and it apparently happened apparently the week that we left, they had flown over the camps and sprayed them from the air to basically terrorize a helpless population. It seemed so outrageous. I had the luxury of being an outsider. That seems to be the way it is. I read about this, with respect to ISIS, for instance, the people who are the most aggressive perpetrators of the atrocities they committed are people who didn’t grow up in the Middle East. They are people who signed on from countries where were doing just fine. It’s another case of projection. So, I was doing that. The refugees as far as I could tell, they didn’t want to kill anyone. They just wanted to be left alone. But I felt this murderous rage. I felt that whoever was in the helicopter had forfeited their claim on humanity. And, therefore, deserved whatever they got. In hindsight, they were acting the way humans always do, and so were the other people.

But it was a feeling of the moment. I wrote the song out of that feeling. I wrestled about whether to record it or not because I didn’t want people to misunderstand it and that I was trying to get people to engage in violence or think about it. But I wanted people how easy it was to get into that mindset. For me all it took was just one circumstance in which I found myself and you think for people who are subject to abuse for generations such as the Guatemalans, the Campesinos, had been, sooner or later it's going to blow up and people are going to fight back, and we should not be judging them when they do. It does apply to Gaza, of course. There’s no justification on any level for the acts of October 7, 2023, but nor is there any justification for being done in retaliation or at least not the way it’s being done. It’s just an enormous tragedy on all sides.”

“If I Had a Rocket Launcher” from “Stealing Fire” (1984)

From his bio: “Throughout his career, Bruce has deftly captured the joy, pain, fear, and faith of human experience in song. Whether singing about retreating to the country or going up against chaos, tackling imperialist lies or embracing ecclesiastical truths, he has always expressed a tough yet hopeful stance: to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight. “We can’t settle for things as they are,” he once warned. “If you don’t tackle the problems, they’re going to get worse.”

Bruce’s commitment to growth has made him both an exemplary citizen and a legendary artist whose prized songbook will be celebrated for many years to come.”

Listen to the whole interview here.