REVIEWS:
Now, this guy's got a great guitar style, far better than the guitars of most of what has become famous in "soft rock," and he knows how to compose pop tunes with great hooks, pleasant sound, and some of the most unforgettable tunes in rock history. His lyrics are poetry. He's put out twenty-five albums from the 1970s all the way up to the end of the millenium.
So why isn't Bruce Cockburn (pronounced "Co-burn") as rich and famous as his other rich, famous rockstar friends? Well, first of all, he's been stereotyped as a Canadian audience playing for a Canadian audience. And secondly, he's a Christian leftist, a mix of religion and politics that's bound to arouse someone's objection. Whatever. This stuff will be our secret, and the folks who rush out to the stores to buy CDs by Eminem or Britney Spears won't feel they've missed a thing. Heavy metal listeners: it would benefit you to consider, when you hear Cockburn, that some people play electric guitar because their abilities on acoustic guitar are limited.
There are plenty of Bruce Cockburn Web sites out there -- two good ones are at http://www.kingsfield.com/cockburn and http://www.stealing-fire.com/bruce. A discography is at http://www.kingsfield.com/cockburn/important_stuff/works/albums/index.htm
--Samuel Fassbinder
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This is one of Cockburn's most explicitly Christian albums (which is not saying a lot), it was released relatively soon after his epiphany and before he started to sing about politics in the 1980s, though he doesn't hit you over the head about it, he doesn't preach, and he doesn't have the Syrupy Christian Disease of religious purveyors of pop music, that they wouldn't be able to recognize a minor chord if it boxed their ears. Not Bruce.
Now, this is in fact one of my favorite albums, especially for the creative guitar work, but also because there are two memorable tunes on it: "Lord Of The Starfields," yep, it's about God, but the lyrics are pretty unobjectionable, and "Silver Wheels," a song about travel that's extremely evocative. You'll want this record for "Silver Wheels" all by itself, it's that good. What's especially awesome is that he plucks the strings throughout the entire tune, without retreating to chord-strumming. As the tune fades to silence, he's still plucking. This song also appears on one of his live albums. "Gavin's Woodpile" is a melancholy and rewarding tune that's a lot of work to listen to, it's about work of course.
Well, those are the best, these are the rest. "Vagabondage" is a pretty tune sung in French, I don't know any French though. "In The Falling Dark" sounds a lot like Cockburn's fellow Canadian, Neil Young - probably not a coincidence, note that Cockburn does not make his voice whine in imitation of Young, thank goodness. Someone on amazon.com said that "Little Seahorse" was about one of Cockburn's ex-wives, it's a cute tune reminiscent of his hippie-music beginnings. Read the amazon.com reviews of Cockburn's first album (which I don't have) -- hippie music is where he started, before proceeding onto Christianity.
"Water Into Wine," an instrumental, tries to be jazzy and only takes off after he dawdles at the beginning with some chords, as well as "Giftbearer," "Giftbearer" has a sort of waterfall sound with a trumpet and a woodwind soloing smoothly across your eardrums. This one and "I'm Gonna Fly Some Day" have a sort of world-beat to them, done in a '70s vein. "I'm Gonna Fly Some Day" is a smooth and optimistic piece of rock music, only one tiny lyric, full of inspiration and hope and a piccolo solo. "Festival of Friends" is more Christian lyrics set to a Cockburn folksong, the sort of stuff he sung again on his 1991 Nothing But A Burning Light album, I guess at that time he was turned on by the spirit of early Christianity, peace and love and the afterlife-myth and all that.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This is really the beginning of Cockburn's political period -- the cover is really Cockburn's best album cover, or maybe his most appropriate -- Cockburn smoking and drinking in a bar while surrounded by a bunch of off-duty military guys. The songs here hold off on naming names and describing events, and concentrate upon prononuncing the general conditions of political life in the wretched 1980s. Cockburn doesn't quite come off with anything so blunt as "disciplining labor" or "monetarism" or "structural adjustment," but hey, this is poetry set to music, not political economy. If you want political economy, you'll have to wait for later Cockburn albums *snicker.* "You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance" starts with this accordion-like VERY CHEESY sound running off the main melody, the keyboards are cheesy too, the electric violin solo is the high point. Or rather the high point is the lyrics, which tell a chaotic story. There's a rockin' version of this on the short live album You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance, so if you want to hear this tune played right, buy that album.
Here you will read some reasons why you should buy THIS album. "The Strong One" is a tough sounding tune with a pounding bass beat and some spooky background keyboards, it's about the people who look after you when you've messed up, I dig the heaviness of this one. "All's Quiet on the Inner City Front" reveals Cockburn's musical model for this album: jazz fusion, perhaps in the mature Steely Dan mode, though Cockburn augments his sound with a haunting electric violin on some of the tunes. The whole album has a bit of the '80s overproduction disease that was to plague "soft rock" during this period of music history.
"All's Quiet," though, no violin, Bruce trying to perfect his mode of political storytelling to music that was to dominate "The Trouble With Normal," "Stealing Fire," "World of Wonders," "Big Circumstance," and "Nothing But A Burning Light". "Wanna Go Walking" is cast to a boogie beat, it's really a love song, but like most later Cockburn songs, it's a song primarily about travel. Its chorus is "I want to go walking/ With you Judy/ Through the movie/ Of the world" CHUG chug chug chug CHUG chug chug chug... "And We Dance" is a love song of Cockburnesque looking-outside-of-oneself-at-one's-doings, it's got that modern jazz feel to it. "Justice" is another heavy tune: lyrics include "Everybody/ Loves to see/ Justice done/ On somebody else" and "Can you tell me how much bleeding/ It takes to give a slogan meaning/ And how much, how much death/ It takes to give a slogan breath".
"Justice" is reggae-cum-modern-jazz; if you want a more reggaeish imitation Marley rhythm, just wait for the next tune "Broken Wheel," a song done masterfully on the Bruce Cockburn Live album. This song sounds like a good imitation of something else that's better, but as such it's not so bad. The "Broken Wheel" is a metaphor of the disruption of the circle of life, it's also a metaphor of the galaxy, the Earth as a small planet orbiting a larger-than-average star toward the end of the galactic arm of a typically mature galaxy. We can only take the relativizing vision-from-above that graces Cockburn's lyrics so far, of course: all of the OTHER galaxies we see have already aged a couple of million years since their light started its long journey toward our eyes, so we have no clue what they look like today.
"Broken Wheel" would have been a great place to end this album; instead he ended the album with the corny "Loner," yeah OK, look Bruce I know what it's like to live by myself so you don't need to set it to melodrama. I guess I can bear to listen to this song simply by the light and heat of the awesome electric violin solo that graces its end. Nine songs, 45 minutes, Bruce's jazziest sound, heavy but not of the two-ton variety to be experienced in some of the later '80s albums. This album gets no more than an 8 if only for some of the obnoxious '80s stuff that shares its stage.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
OK, I listened to the American version of this album a zillion times during the late '80s on my car's tape player, during the Big Circumstance period, so I dig some of the songs, and I definitely like what he was trying to do with the lyrics. But many of the melodies on this album aren't much fun, the synthesizer gets obnoxious (much more so than on Inner City Front). This really shows itself on "The Trouble With Normal," which speaks a sentiment that I really agree with, a sentiment that is still valid today. "Candy Man's Gone," a song about the end of Keynesianism, great lyrics again, but kind of an annoyingly sugary melody. With "Hoop Dancer" we finally have a respectable tune, over the music Cockburn tells the story of a Native American ritual dance, nice and all. More of that great electric violin of Inner City Front but even better. Beepbeep beep beepbeep beepbeep beep beepbeep...
Then "Waiting For The Moon" has a great melody, memorable and singable. Bruce's subjectivity is out on some beach in some Third World vacation spot in the Americas, romantically drunk, hurray. The German version of this album has an instrumental "Cala Luna" inserted between this and the next song, "Tropic Moon." If you own the American version, you aren't missing anything. "Tropic Moon" is another song of Latin American terror, I'm sorry, I don't like the tune though. Nor am I terribly fond of "Going Up Against Chaos" or the pseudo-reggae of "Put Our Hearts Together" or the synthesizer of "Civilization And Its Discontents." The songs are mediocre enough to be listenable, "Going Up Against Chaos" has probably the best melody of these songs.
"Planet of the Clowns" is the mental site of a hauntingly beautiful reminiscence of mine, staring out over the waves of a northern California beach while US machines pound the Americas into submission, also I remember listening to this tune while driving purposelessly around southern California with some obnoxious Deadheads. There's a profound sadness as Bruce full-voices the chorus: "As the waves roar on the beach like a squadron of F-16s/ Ebb and flow like the better days they say this world has seen." If you think this tune is corny, give the album a 5. Beyond the three or four tunes I've praised, I think that Bruce got carried away with synthesizers, syncopation, and backbeat, and put out something mediocre as a result. At least none of this stuff has the horrid melodic qualities of Jackson Browne's World In Motion.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This is the romantic album of the 1980s Left. I first heard this album with a bunch of communal White Rasta-heads in a cabin deep in the backwoods of the West, in one of the more unforgettable moments of my life. The memory sticks with me to this day, and as far as I know these folks still have a listing in the "Directory of Intentional Communities," (http://www.ic.org/) though I'm not sure it's really them -- or maybe the listing is about someone else.
"Lovers In A Dangerous Time" is the first song of the album, and it was the romantic image of those with a love interest (as I had then) during the Reagan Era, when at that time George Herbert Walker Bush's shock troops (remember, Ronnie basically let Bush handle most of the covert stuff) were doing some the deeds that gained such acclaim in Chomsky's "Deterring Democracy". Read Hector Tobar's novel "The Tattooed Soldier" if you want an idea of the image Cockburn is painting. "Maybe The Poet" is a reinvocation of the age-old theme of the artist as social misfit and conscience of the corrupt Kingdom, dating back (most prominently) to the voice of the Fool of Shakespeare's "King Lear." Cockburn's take on this theme is really masterful.
"Sahara Gold" is a song about some sort of fascination or enchantment -- its beat marches on, its tune as good as some of the other stuff you hear on Cockburn albums. "Making Contact" is a song to reassure you that Cockburn's understanding of Christian love includes all types of love -- its horn section is kind of hokey. "Peggy's Kitchen Wall" has a soft pop melody, but is a song about some crime -- its many-voiced chorus sings "who put that bullet hole in Peggy's kitchen wall?" Nobody else writes songs like this, so we might as well enjoy them when they appear here. That was Side One of the vinyl edition of this album, not necessarily the best side, but still with plenty of virtue.
"To Raise The Morning Star," the next song on the CD version, is a presentation of Cockburn's mystic vision of community -- he gives it some great musical theater, it might be something hokey like the Live Aid performances, or it might be something real like the subject of Cockburn's follow-up song, about Sandinista Nicaragua, at any rate "To Raise The Morning Star" has been recorded more than a few times live, you might want to find one of those on Bruce Cockburn Live, or on a bootleg if you can find bootlegs via the Websites I've supplied, since this brand of earnestness is best experienced live. "Nicaragua" sings the tale of Cockburn's visit there during the 1980s, great stuff, realistic details in the lyrics, memorable Spanish-sounding melody. "Don't let them stop you now, Nicaragua..." To think, all they really did with their ill-gotten money was to kidnap a few civilians, burn a few harvests, and slaughter a few people, enough to make Nicaragua feel very uncomfortable back then. Of course, that was enough -- they stopped Nicaragua, contrary to Cockburn's hopes, and Nicaragua has slid backwards under the feeble Chamorro regime (and even worse under Arnoldo Aleman), some of the tale of Nicaragua's backward slide during the Sandinista Administration is told in Phil Ryan's "The Fall and Rise of The Market In Sandinista Nicaragua," there's also the pathetic example of post-Sandinista economics as told in Michael Calvin McGee's et al.'s book "The New Work Order"...
"If I Had A Rocket Launcher" is about the despicable deeds declaimed in William Blum's book "Killing Hope," this shit really happened and none other than your US government did it all, and what's worse is that it's still going on today and you aren't doing anything about it, not that there's a lot you could do without a rocket launcher. I guess he visited the refugee camps outside the Guatemalan border, quite populous during the '80s, to be inspired to write this one. Once again, "The Tattooed Soldier" sets the right tone. Cockburn's no pacifist, as neither is "The Tattooed Soldier's" protagonist: "If I had a rocket launcher/ Some son of a bitch would die..."
The album ends with "Dust And Diesel," about more Cockburn reflections on his Nicaragua visit, and which for my money has the best melody and lyrics of any song on this album, definitely my favorite. "Smiling girl directing traffic flow/ .45 strapped over cotton print dress/ Marimba-brown and graceful limbs/ Give me a moment of loneliness" or "Headlights pick out fallen sack of corn/ One lone tarantula standing guard/ We pull up and stop and she ambles off/ Discretion much the better part of cars" Side Two should overcome any reservation you may have about the hokier parts of Side One.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
I once knew an acquaintance from a communal household, a very pretty decaying piece of crap household reminiscent of one of Van Gogh's paintings (you know, the one depicting the small bedroom) which held a onetime friend of mine, and this friend owned a set of Bruce Cockburn concert bootlegs. Since I didn't hang there often enough to listen to them all, I asked him to make a copy of his best bootleg for me. Well, this taper friend's best Cockburn bootleg was taken from an acoustic concert from the World Of Wonders era. At some point, later in my life, after I lost my gift bootleg, I decided to listen to the actual World Of Wonders CD. It was so sterile and impersonal when compared to what I'd heard on the bootleg that I sold it back to the record store. Later I lost the bootleg and found another copy of World Of Wonders in the record store.
"Call it Democracy" is the first song on this album, and it's a classic as far as lyrics are concerned, with some fairly good guitar pyrotechnics as well -- however, you're likely to hear the guitar pyrotechnics in better form on the You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance album. There are synthesizers on this version, adding a sort of creepy feeling to this -- granted, maybe a song declaiming the International Monetary Fund should sound kind of creepy, but I am not impressed by the arrangement of this song. "Lily Of The Midnight Sky" has a majestic sweeping chorus that is not complimented (once again) by the synthesizer accompaniment, interrupting a big long refrain with Bruce mumbling something poetic. This structure is something Bruce has stuck with -- there's a song like this on Bruce's 2000 album Breakfast In New Orleans, Dinner In Timbuktu.
The title tune is next on this album, and once again this song sounded better on the bootleg without the synthesizers. The next song, "Berlin Tonight," contains an eerie depiction of Berlin during the Cold War. Here the synthesizers are quite understated, the way they should have been throughout the album (but weren't.) "People See Through You" is a beautiful song when done on Bruce's solo acoustic guitar, but grates like nails on a chalkboard on this album, and would be a complete waste of time here if it weren't for the electric guitar solo at the end. "See How I Miss You" is a cool song with some corny aspects (the endless chant of the title, overuse of drums) done fairly tastefully here. "Santiago Dawn" is about the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, tries to be powerful but comes off corny -- you have to remind yourself that Bruce is singing about something very serious here. "Dancing in Paradise" starts off like the refrain of "Lily of the Midnight Sky" -- mumbled narrative refrain over muted tune. It's nicely done, like that other song. "Down Here Tonight" ends this record on a positive note, a song of joy supposedly written amidst merriment in Tobago (in the Caribbean, of course).
There are some powerful songs here, esp. for the lyrics, and secondly for the tunes as they are composed, it's just that the 1980s synthesizers/ production values thing has too many of them like a powerful case of pneumonia. If you can find these songs performed elsewhere, so much the better. If you can't, well, you may want this album. But I can't say you'd appreciate them if you hear them in this form first. This album will leave you with the impression that Bruce can do better.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This is another one of those albums that I've heard a zillion times, mostly because it was an enormous favorite of mine when I owned a red Toyota hatchback and was driving it to and fro Sonoma County in search of a Master's degree in English. It's funny that I'm only now trying to make that degree pay off financially. This is an album with some very attractive songs, and some songs that will just bore you to death. The first song is "If A Tree Falls," believe it or not there was a video of this song that made VH1, I've actually seen it. It rocks -- there's a refrain where Bruce lectures us upon the disappearance of the rainforests and the consequences thereof, Bruce whimpers a bit about that place where those "wild things have to go/ to disappear/ forever," but you know he's right, and it's all worth it when you hear him tell you oh-so-acidly about those "brand new flood plains" created by human mismanagement.
"Shipwrecked At The Stable Door" is a darkly funny song about how life is tough, it rocks, its pithy commentary holds up upon repeated listenings. "Gospel of Bondage" is long and boring, it's Cockburn's left-wing Christian argument against right-wing Christianity, still, the line about the "sign of the double cross" is pretty funny. "Don't Feel Your Touch" is pretty mellow, it's one of these wistful songs of absent love that makes you wonder what it's really about. "Tibetan Side of Town" is Cockburn's narrative about China's exploitation of Tibet as seen from the perspective of a tourist visiting Kathmandu (the capital of Nepal, of course). It chugs along in a sort of jazz-rock vein as Cockburn rumbles on with metonymies, detail after detail, about the things he saw. "Understanding Nothing" is an attempt to express a Zen moment, I really don't know enough about Zen to say that this song really works, I dunno, I still like it. "Where The Death Squad Lives" is more acid toughguy Cockburn inveighing against what appears to be Guatemalan life in the Eighties (*shudder*).
Once again, I can't recommend Hector Tobar's "The Tattooed Soldier" enough, although this song seems almost routine in its tale of woe. "Radium Rain" is the next song, and this is long, monotonous, heavy blues about the impending death of nuclear radiation doubtless written in the aftermath of the explosion at Chernobyl, I get the point but why oh why, why, why, why so long, I'm bored, press the fast-forward button QUICK! on to "Pangs of Love," another piece of unrequited love (the type I saw in that period of my life, that long bittersweet period at the beginning of Bush Senior when I listened to this album), and "The Gift," a pretty song that chugs on in Greatful Dead-like euphoria, a song they loved to play on Pacifica Radio. "Anything Can Happen" is a carpe diem song, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we may die, reminiscent of Bruce's performance on the Bruce Cockburn Live of Monty Python's "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life." Yeah, there's a silly clarinet on this one.
I really ought to dig this album more than I do, especially for such unforgivably long and morose tunes such as "Bospel of Gondage" and "Radium Rain," and for such mediocre stuff as "Where The Death Squad Lives." But mediocre Cockburn is still pretty good, and this album is part of my life, a part of my life that sucks as much as the present era of my life sucks, so it's getting a seven, even if it's just a low seven. This album still reminds me of the vast grasslands that used to surround Sonoma State University before the developers paved them over.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This album existed in the short period while Cockburn was still writing politicized lyrics, yet after the period of synthesizer use that brought him to produce such works as 1985's World Of Wonders. This one is supposed to have an Old West flavor to it -- I suppose it's a US Old West, Canada has its own Old West with the Calgary Stampede and all. T-Bone Burnett produced this album, Jackson Browne and Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell's ex-husband) lurk in the background... the cover and the inner sleeve look kind of Western-hokey, if you ask me. The songs, most of them, are pretty good, all in this theme, with one major exception. "A Dream Like Mine" is an upbeat piece of encouragement, "Kit Carson" is Bruce's reminder that the West, where I live, was the site of the genocide of First Nations people that occured in the last half of the 19th century.
"Mighty Trucks Of Midnight" is a song about jobs and livelihoods moving to the maquiladora factories where people work for next to nothing, a song against NAFTA, and it might as well be a song against FTAA as well, that big meeting this year "in secret" in Quebec City, the one being protested at http://parksmanagement.com/border/, behind its concertina-wire fortress, to rule us all through "free trade" as a code-name for wage labor. One of the reasons this album gets such a good rating is that it HAS a song like "Mighty Trucks Of Midnight," consider, dear reader, the lasting value of an album that discusses the REAL trends of our times, and not just some overpromoted effluent like Limp Bizkit or Britney Spears that sells records by virtue of its proximity to the heart-pulse of mall life, with no clue of history or the future.
"Soul of a Man" was learned from a 1930 recording by Blind Willie Johnson, it was encouraging to hear (when this came out) that there's a sort of continuum, both religious and musicological, between old blues and new Cockburn. "Great Big Love" reveals a different shade of Cockburn's leftist politics: "I ride and I shoot and I play guitar/ And I like my life just fine/ If you try to take one of these things from me/ Then you're no friend of mine..." Songs like this ought to take something away from the media stereotype of leftists... of course, you've all been conditioned by years of listening to the media oligopolies and their twisted versions of reality, whether you want such conditioning or you think you've rejected it. Still, listening to this stuff might complicate your understanding of the world in a good way..."One Of The Best Ones" is just a simple ballad expressing a sort of backhanded love.
The other side of my cassette tape has another set of tunes in this vein. "Somebody Touched Me" is another love ballad in Western vein, followed by "Cry Of A Tiny Babe," a tedious retelling of Jesus' birth that is really tough for me to hear all the way through without pressing the fast-forward button. The melody drones on and on in a really annoying fashion. After that, if you don't miss it by fast-forwarding too far, is a great instrumental "Actions Speak Louder," an instrumental theme for a film "The Greenpeace Years," and "Indian Wars," another reminder of the sort of oppression expressed in Buffy Sainte-Marie's "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying" off the Little Wheel Spin And Spin album.
"When It's Gone, It's Gone," allows us one more droll sentiment off of Cockburn's guitar, and "Child Of The Wind" concludes the album with its wispy reflections upon the freedom to get lost -- "There's roads and there's roads/ And they call can't you hear it/ Roads of the earth, and roads of the spirit/ The best roads of all are the ones that aren't certain/ One of those is where you'll find me when they drop the big curtain..." This is the sort of album you'd want to hear in San Bernardino County, California, or maybe southern Utah or New Mexico or Arizona (outside of Phoenix) or eastern Washington State or somewhere like that. Somewhere vaguely like that.
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