Life in Trumpâs America doesnât end at the countryâs borders. The present-day eraâs global scope means that, sonar-like, the current U.S. presidentâs impact tears across the world, including upward to the countryâs endearing northern neighbor. Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote his new album, Bone on Bone, under the unnerving atmosphere that has settled like grey ash over contemporary life ever since the 2016 presidential election. Several songs, including âCafĂ© Societyâ and âStates Iâm In,â touch on the agitation rippling through communities and individuals, while âFalse Riverâ decries a more specific issue: pipelines. âLife blood of the land, consort of our earth, pulse to the pull of moonrise, can you tally what itâs worth?â he sings against a locomotive rhythm that practically pulses with exigency. Trump, specifically, doesnât pop up on the album, but his influence can be felt in the at-times brooding reflections which spur Cockburnâs latest songs.
The LP marks Cockburnâs 33rd and arrives seven years after his last effort, Small Source of Comfort. The time in between took his attention to other places, including fatherhood and his 2014 memoir, Rumours of Glory. It took contributing a song to the documentary Al Purdy Was Here (about the Canadian poet) to spark his songwriting once again. Cockburn has long pointed his weapons of choice — namely, his pen and his guitar — at issues impacting the world, and Bone on Bone makes clear that his song-based activism hasnât eased any. If anything, he doubles down, impressing upon listeners the detrimental forces propelled by division, isolation, and more. Cockburn tapped Ruby Amanfu, Mary Gauthier, Brandon Robert Young, and even singers from the church he regularly attends — known on the album as the San Francisco Lighthouse chorus — to offset his dusky vocals and paint an inclusive picture of community, even while his songâs subject matter toed a more solitudinous line. His lyricism, as pointed and precise as ever, proves that the septuagenarian still has important messages to share, and will do exactly that — so long as his mind and breath and energy allow him. A new inductee to the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, the timing couldnât be more aligned.
It feels more important than ever to have messengers like you.
Thank you for saying that. It does feel like a time when we have to emphasize communication, because everything is so polarized. Weâre all looking at slogans and talking in slogans all the time, but it seems really important to share an experience with each other.
Yeah, in keeping with that idea of slogans — even thinking about the way social media packages thought — how do you feel your songwriting has had to change to reach across the aisle, so to speak?
I donât really have a good answer for that. Itâs a legitimate question, but I feel I havenât really changed my approach to songwriting. I think itâs a question of maintaining some sort of footing in reality. We all have our own idea of what reality is, but social media creates a false reality. Iâm not very involved in social media, so Iâm not the best person to be passing judgment on it. At the same time, Iâm not involved with it because I donât trust it, because I donât like it. Thereâs a great usefulness to it, granted — itâs really great when you can communicate with people at a distance quickly, and if you have something sensible to communicate — but it doesnât stop at that. For me, itâs a world of BS and I donât really want to spend time in that world.
Sure. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, âIf there was a sensible message.â
Itâs not very hard to find opinions being passed off as news that really are offensive, whatever your perspective. Most of the time you donât learn anything, because you just get annoyed. Thatâs a problem, because it could be a forum for greater understanding.
You touch on a bit of that with âStates Iâm In,â and I love the titleâs play on words: Noddings toward the division people may now feel as individuals and as a country. Whatâs the most significant message you think listeners need to hear today?
Well, I donât think the song offers an answer, really, except a spiritual one. I didnât design the album to have a particular theme, but there is that underlying theme that the spiritual world is one where we can actually meet — or where we need to go, whether we meet or not. It puts things in a perspective that is less prone to being blown this way and that by the winds coming out of various high-profile people. [Laughs]
âStates Iâm Inâ is a kind of capsulized dark night of the soul experience. The song unfolds with a sunset and it ends with dawn and, in the meantime, thereâs all this stuff — itâs not all autobiographical, although the feelings are. I think the feelings that the song expresses are feelings a lot of us experience, so it has that application for somebody other than me. You can get swept away by all the stuff, but in the end, whatâs essential is that relationship with the divine. Thatâs the whisper welling up from the depths and, if you can shut up long enough to listen for that whisper, itâs there.
Speaking about the albumâs spirituality, the number 33 has a powerful religious and spiritual connotation. Does the fact that this is album number 33 hold any meaning for you?
Thatâs an interesting question, too. I hadnât thought of that, so I guess the answerâs “no,” but maybe subliminally it did. The number that I did think of is the [song] â40 Years in the Wilderness,â and thatâs more specific, both as a reference and in my own life.
And thereâs also the fact that itâs been seven years between albums, and seven is a potent number, as well.
Yeah, I know, weâre getting all numerological here.
And I donât necessarily mean to!
Itâs not a belief system that I adhere to, particularly, but I do find it interesting when those things show up. There are certain years in my life … I mean, a year that adds up to four is almost never a good year for me, and almost all the other ones are. So what does that mean? Maybe itâs totally subjective or maybe itâs not.
Or, if you head into those particular years with that mindset, you create your own issues.
Right, itâs impossible. I can never stand back far enough to be sure Iâm not doing that. I think all of those kinds of esoteric ways of trying to understand things — whether itâs numerology or the tarot or astrology — they all have some functionality. They all work in some way. But what Iâve thought over the years is that they seem to operate as enhancements to your own sense of contact to the bigger reality, so it doesnât really matter which one you use, if it helps you. If you have a sensitivity to that kind of listening state, those things help you listen, and they might help you listen — in the case of the tarot — to somebody elseâs condition.
Once anything becomes a belief system that can be passed on and you can train people in it and so on, itâs kind of like training musician. I havenât been to Berklee in some time, and really appreciated it as a great school, and it still is, but the problem with that and the problem with any system of education is, you teach people to be the same as each other. The geniuses will transcend that; theyâll learn all the stuff and then theyâll go on and be themselves. But the people that are not geniuses will end up being very good at what they do but sounding like each other. And I think the same thing applies to spiritual training: You can learn all that stuff and it doesnât make you gifted.
It doesnât, and I wonder how much “genius” here applies to a sense of bravery.
Yeah, maybe so, whether itâs bravery or necessity. Some people are brave and step out in spite of their surroundings or themselves, and others of us just luck into it. This is what I know how to do, and I kind of care what people think about it, but Iâm not going to let their opinions stop me.
Right, and then speaking of another individual in that sense, your song â3 Al Purdysâ … what is it about his use of language that holds such magic for you?
He had great insight for one thing — into people and the historical place of things. And, as a young poet, heâs kind of raw and brash and very Canadian, very colloquial, very rough around the edges, but interesting as all get-out. And then, as he gets older, as the poems become more recent, he becomes more speculative and thoughtful and more international, also. His thought processes are beautifully articulated and communicable, therefore.
Heâs got some really visceral introspections.
His hit is the poem where heâs in a bar in Ontario, and he tries to get somebody to buy him a beer in exchange for a poem and it doesnât work, and he reflects on what poetry is really worth, when it wonât even buy you a beer. And of course thatâs the side of Al Purdy that my song is thinking of. Everybody who knows Al Purdy knows that poem, and itâs so archetypically Canadian. You kind of had to be there to appreciate it. I donât know how it would seem to somebody from the U.S. Nonetheless, it captures some aspect of Ontario culture thoroughly. Heâs basically my dadâs generation, and he spent the â30s riding the rails back and forth across Canada, looking for work like everybody else. Both of the spoken word sections in the song are excerpts from his poetry.
Congratulations, by the way, on being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. I know the country has honored you in a few different ways, but what did it mean to be recognized for your songwriting?
It means people are listening. Itâs gratifying and humbling, and Iâm very grateful for it. An award is a thing, an event, and the event has its own meaning, and it had meaning. It was nice to be part of it, and then, you know, I have a thing to take home and put somewhere that Iâll have to dust. [Laughs]
What a way to look at it!
But what it represents, like I said, is that people are paying attention, and an artist canât ask for anything more.
Very true. Well, my last question is admittedly silly. Youâve been called the âCanadian Bob Dylan,â so who would you say is the American Bruce Cockburn?
Um, Iâd like it to be Tom Waits, but âŠ
Alright, letâs just make that claim!
I donât think anybodyâs anybody except themselves, but I remember way back in the day being described in more than one review of a show as the Canadian John Denver, and the only similarity is that we both have round glasses. Itâs such a cheap way to try to describe something. Itâd be better to describe me as not the next Canadian this or that: Heâs not the Canadian Bob Dylan. Heâs not the next Leonard Cohen. Heâs not the next Joni Mitchell. If you do enough of those, you can kind of get to what the person might be. If I had to be some American singer/songwriter, Tom Waits would be high on my list. Lucinda Williams would be high on my list, too. And Ani DiFranco is a terrific songwriter and closer, in a certain sense, to what I do. I forget where it was, but I was described as Ani DiFrancoâs uncle.
No way.
Itâs better than being described as âthe next Canadian something or other.â It was actually kind of an honor, but these comparisons … if theyâre not amusing, then theyâre sort of not very nice.