Bruce Cockburn

Bruce Cockburn

AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET
On You’ve Never Seen Everything, Bruce Cockburn Explores New Terrain of the Heart and Head
Few artists of the rock era have committed themselves to exploring the thin line between the personal and the political like Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn. In the course of a long career, this gifted singer, composer, and guitarist has never flinched from burrowing deep into an issue, be it global conflict, ecological problems, or how morality encroaches on affairs of the heart. Cockburn spoke with Janie Matthews about the making of You’ve Never Seen Everything, his first studio album in four years.

Barnes & Noble.com: From the opening track, "Tried & Tested," it’s clear you’ve been wrestling with compelling political and personal issues. There’s a lot of anger, despair, and resignation, but also perseverance, hope, even delight. I see it as a song-cycle journey to the heart of darkness, or Apocalypse Now!, a vision quest for the salvation of the world, the spiritual self, and the heart. What were you going through making this album?

Bruce Cockburn: Wow, I don’t think I can add anything to that description -- it’s as good as I could hope for! Yeah, it takes longer to make albums now, mostly because there’s more touring, but in this particular case I also took a year off. I was feeling a little burnt, hadn’t been writing much, and in fact had an extended kind of dry spell that ended with the work I did with Andy Milne. Lucky for me, Andy came along with an invitation to collaborate on some songs, whatever we happened to end up with, something I haven’t done much of since the ‘60s. So that presented a certain challenge, and it seemed like the ticket out of the dry spell. And it was, as it turned out. We got together and we came up with those two songs. Anyway, that got things rolling, and the stuff just kept rolling out. I planned a year off because the last time that had happened to me, I found that declaring myself on sabbatical cured it just by not having to be somewhere, do stuff, and scatter my focus all over the place. But this year, well, I’m not going to go into too much of it, there was a lot of personal stuff…

B&N.com: What political, world-at-large, events were involved?

BC: The world at large is what it is; things have taken a serious downturn in that regard. There’s no question we’re in a more precarious situation now. Maybe it was always there, but I think the situation’s more precarious now -- at least partly because of the policies of the Bush administration -- than it was ten years ago, say, and it was precarious enough then. A lot of really bad things have been set in motion the last few years, or failures to take advantage of opportunities to improve things that were already in motion, like the nuclear treaty. The U.S. didn’t have to exert itself to keep that process going, yet the Bush guys pulled back from all that. To me, though, these things are frightening, not depressing -- there’s a bit more excitement involved than depression allows for. I sometimes get asked, How do I look at these things, write about them, and still be hopeful? It’s not a contest; the hope is just there, and the light. As I tried to get at in the album’s darkest song, the title song, the light is always there, whether you can see it there or not. So it’s not hard for me to be hopeful, or to feel the presence of the divine, really, in whatever’s going on.

B&N.com: It’s a very dark, moody album, yet there’s that current of resistance through hope, as if that’s how you fight the despair.

BC: Well, I think it is. Although I don’t think you can just manufacture hope; I think you have to get it from somewhere, or at least be fed with some energy that allows you to be hopeful -- you can’t just look at all the shit and think, Hmmm, I’ll be hopeful now. But really, you got it; if there’s a single theme to the album, it’s the idea of hope in the face of the disastrous effect of human greed. And greed is really behind almost all of the problems that we see around. It’s greed that’s responsible for the environmental damage and the failure to address it. It’s greed that’s responsible for stuff like the Iraq war. Sometimes I’m accused of dilettantism because I refer to so many different causes in songs or day to day, but to me, there is only one cause: the human spirit and the way it exists in nature, which is also in us -- they’re two parts of the same thing. Everything else is about that. And the distance we’ve allowed ourselves to get from our true nature and from our understanding of our relationship to the cosmos is so great now that a lot of people can’t see past it, can’t even imagine that such a relationship exists. I think that’s what makes a Rumsfeld, or an Ashcroft; these guys don’t know where they came from.

B&N.com: How would you describe your music to someone unfamiliar with it?

BC: I would say singer/songwriter music. If I get a blank look, I’ll go, y’know, sorta like folk/rock. I may try to describe it more, but there’s not really a good term for what I do. "Singer/songwriter" is closest, because it’s one of those terms that catches everything -- Alanis Morissette is a singer/songwriter who doesn’t sound anything like me. The essential point is that we are people who are singing our own songs, which is different from doing songs somebody else wrote. I don’t have a convenient label to put on my music, which in some ways has been the bane of my existence for decades. I like thinking of things in eclectic terms -- that’s Rob Wasserman’s term for his music, eclectic music. It’s a good word, because it allows you to do anything, and it recognizes that we all are influenced by everything around.

B&N.com: What do you listen to when you’re depressed or stressed and want to unwind?

BC: I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer! [laughs] I’m stuck with reruns now!

B&N.com: This is your 27th album, and over three decades you’ve gotten a devoted audience that’s followed your development. How important is it for an artist to keep evolving?

BC: It’s vital to be constantly evolving; otherwise you die. It’s like anything else in life -- if you don’t grow, you stagnate. That doesn’t mean you have to keep changing direction. Sometimes evolution means growing through the thing that you do, going deeper and deeper into it and making it more and more perfect. I do float around from one thing to another maybe more, but if it all comes together in the end like I think it is, then maybe I’m getting deeper too. But yeah, it’s grow or die; that’s absolutely critical.

June 16, 2003