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news from
the cockburn project
at
www.cockburnproject.net
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13 January 2003

Greetings:

Happy New Year from all of us at The Cockburn Project. Here's hoping
for peace and understanding to thrive in the New Year and having the
means to make it happen.

On to 'news' about Bruce, which is what our readers are really
interested in, right? We have a new front page article put together
by editor Bobbi Wisby on Bruce's recent gig with Bambi and the Deer
Hunters, which Bruce described himself in 1999 in a Ryko press
release:

"Colin and I have an extracurricular project called Bambi & The Deer
Hunters, which is a band that plays once or twice a year at a club in
Toronto. We play new stuff of ours, assorted old tunes; songs we
don't know."

Well this year the 'extracurricular project' included Bruce Cockburn,
Blackie and the Rodeo Kings (Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, Tom
Wilson), Richard Bell, Gary Craig and John Dymond. Check out
http://www.cockburnproject.net to read the full review by
contributors Rob Caldwell, Nancy Bouwma and Leanne Davis. Bruce
previewed some of the new work to be coming out on his next release.
Read on for information about that.

True North reports that the upcoming new release is currently
titled: You've Never Seen Everything. Bruce commented on this
latest endeavor 8 March 2002, when he said:

"Virtually all the songs at this point are acoustic, but that doesn't
mean that they won't be treated with a rhythm section or a band in
the studio," Cockburn said. They tend to be personal and
introspective, but there's a long spoken-word piece about Cambodia.
There are some "poppier'-sounding songs. There are no overtly
political songs, although the philosophical stances that are
described include a jaundiced view of certain political things."

"I'm just doing what I always do. It's just the blues, really."

--from Cockburn's musical passion live in new CD, Anonymity doesn't
stop, 'Greatest Hits' collection, Denver Post, 8 March 2002, by G.
Brown

This new release features the likes of Emmylou Harris, Jackson
Browne, Sam Phillips, Sarah Harmer, Hugh Marsh, Jonell Mosser, Larry
Taylor and Steven Hodges. Keep watching your 'in box' for more
information as we get it. There is currently no release date set for
this album, nor is Bruce currently touring.

Editor David Newton has lots of setlist updates to report, let us
know if you have any additional information on any of these gigs:

http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/1980s/index.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/1988/march26.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/1989/september23.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/1992/index.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/1992/july26.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/1992/august29.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/1992/august30.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/2002/index.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/2002/june29.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/2002/july1.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/2002/july24.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/2002/september22.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/2002/november16.html
http://www.cockburnproject.net/gigs/2002/december28.html

For your reading pleasure, I'll finish with a contribution from
editor Audrey Pearson, who offers this article/interview she found
on a recent search.

Nov 6, 2002 / vol 9 no 14
Man of many words
Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn speaks thoughtfully on hope, faith
and teenage groupies
by Frank Rabey / frabey@...

"I'm no good at sound bites," Bruce Cockburn admitted with a laugh
following yet another lengthy response to a question.

The esteemed singer/songwriter was taking a break from recording his
24th album of previously unreleased material - and his first for
Rounder Records - to chat by phone.

Except that Cockburn, 57, is not a man who chats. His mind latches
onto a subject and caresses it until it shines; when he's finally
spoken his piece, you understand that his music comes by its
characteristic depth quite honestly.

Cockburn has been a professional musician for more than 35 years, and
his most recent output ranks among his best. A lifelong activist, he
gets as fired up as ever over causes he believes in, like the
worldwide ban on land-mine use (see "Explosive Content").

He began his career inauspiciously enough, dropping his jazz-guitar
studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston in the mid-1960s to
join the first of a series of short-lived rock bands in his native
Canada.

Cockburn's first group, The Children, boasted a fan club - The
Children's Revolutionary Army - of about six teenage girls, he
recalls. Olivus, one of his final groups before going solo, featured
a young, bell-bottomed Cockburn playing end-of-show guitar solos with
his teeth.

"It was ludicrous," he says with a chuckle.

Cockburn's early albums are, by contrast, true starry-eyed folk,
pretty and often sweetly naive, with spare, inward-looking lyrics
expressing growing spiritual concerns.

But with the release of the transcendent Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws
(Columbia, 1979) - with its gorgeous single "Wondering Where the
Lions Are" - Cockburn's music seemed virtually reborn.

Spiritual references had become decidedly Christian. Musical
arrangements were fuller, framing Cockburn's precise, shimmering
guitar. Lyrics were denser, and often unabashedly poetic, displaying
a heightened sensitivity to word choices and startling images that
often recalled the earthy romanticism of Chilean master poet Pablo
Neruda.

And gone was the overt navel-gazing: Cockburn's focus was shifting to
the world outside.

His increasingly global outlook peaked with a trio of essential
Columbia Records releases - The Trouble With Normal (1983), Stealing
Fire (1984) and World of Wonders (1985). The music was big and
insistent, its lyrics frequently pitting Cockburn's humanistic
Christian faith against global military and economic forces
responsible for acts of appalling atrocity, particularly in Latin
America.

Cockburn knows the music opened some listeners' eyes to ugliness
they'd never imagined - "the evils they are unwittingly a part of,"
as he puts it - but he prefers to view his impact in more optimistic
terms.

"In the early '80s, I heard from a lot of people who cited my songs
as an inspiration to get involved with Nicaragua and, in many cases,
to go there and work on coffee-picking brigades and that kind of
thing," he reveals. "Music has the capacity to do that; if people are
ready to hear a certain thing, then music can be a catalyst for all
sorts of action."

The pinnacle tune from this period remains Stealing Fire's
misleadingly beautiful "If I Had a Rocket Launcher." The song, based
on Cockburn's trips to shanty camps in Mexico where U.S.-funded
Guatemalan soldiers in helicopters strafed their own refugees, builds
to a fevered declaration of hate.

"If I had a rocket launcher," Cockburn - a staunch pacifist - snarls
at the song's sudden end, "some son-of-a-bitch would die."

"It's one thing to see these things on TV and have a vague sense of
what they must be like," Cockburn comments now. "It's a whole other
thing to be in it, and to be surrounded by people who had fled
something as horrendous as what those particular refugees had fled,
and [who were then] living in the most desperate conditions
imaginable, but still maintaining a sense of hope and integrity
within themselves."

A set of lyrics in "Last Night of the World," from Cockburn's most
recent studio album of new material, Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner
in Timbuktu (Rykodisc, 1999), revisits the memory:

"I've seen the flame of hope among the hopeless/ And it was truly the
biggest heartbreak of all/ That was the straw that broke me open ... "

Cockburn left that refugee camp, he says, convinced that succumbing
to hopeless is an act of pure decadence.

"In our North American/Western culture, we have that luxury, and we
indulge it," he elaborates. "As youth, we certainly do: 'Oh, it's all
hopeless. Everything's f**ked up.' And, y'know, here were people who
were dealing with the real stuff, and they [weren't] hopeless.

"The sense that hope is available to people - sometimes maybe because
of being confronted with the darkest, heaviest things - really
changed my way of looking at the world."

Cockburn's recent recorded output charts a shift in focus back to the
internal, though his best work, including the often sublime Breakfast
in New Orleans, strikes a balance between the external world and the
one within.

That sense of balance may help explain how Cockburn, who wears his
faith openly but doesn't wield it, has achieved a most peculiar
distinction: He's popular even among declared nonbelievers.

How does he pull it off?

"Faith, to me, isn't about Christianity, and certainly not about the
church," Cockburn observes. "It's about the fact that there is
something divine, and it matters whether I pay attention to it or
not. That's the starting point for my songs.

"I came by my faith honestly," he adds. "I didn't start out with it.
My parents are agnostics, and I grew up in a household that put no
importance whatsoever on religion. We went to church because the
neighbors would talk if we didn't.

"But that was it, and it was very clearly understood," Cockburn
continues. "We went through the motions, as everybody did coming from
a WASP middle-class background."

Cockburn first began grappling with spiritual issues in high school,
reading Buddhist teachings under the influence of the Beat writers.
He remembers thinking: These guys are onto something.

"[I realized] that I felt the truth of that kind of speculation -
that there was something more to life than the physical," he
notes, "and that something, whatever it was, needed to be addressed.
The form in which I've addressed it over the years has changed from
time to time, but in the early '70s, it crystallized into my adoption
of the Christian faith and the Christian way of going at spirituality.

"I can remember reading the Bible to look for the juicy bits in early
high school," he confesses with a chuckle. "That was the only
interest I had in [it]. So I totally understand why somebody would
not immediately go: 'Oh, yeah, Christ is living before me now. I'm
going to get down on my knees and volunteer my services.' There are a
lot of us for whom that isn't a natural act.

"The whole point of what I do, I think, is to share experience," he
concludes. "In a concert situation, music provides a means by which
everybody present can share the experience of being there, but it
also provides a way that I can share my own experience with people.
If you find something that touches you in there, then great."

Peace to all,
Suzanne Myers
editor@...