Bruce Cockburn started on a musical path for himself that took him to unexpected places. From Boston’s Berklee College of Music with aspirations to write for jazz orchestras to psychedelic bands on the same bill as the Jimi Hendrix experience, Cockburn diverged again for his solo career. From 1970 onward, he favoured an acoustically-inclined folk-jazz style with rural blues sensibilities, later incorporating rock, pop, and world music into a piquant fusion that is uniquely his own.
Another journey that’s guided him as an artist is his spirituality, and how to reconcile and implement it in a world of globalization with all of the political and economic consequences it’s had on Third World countries in view. Across a five-decade career, that balance between the worlds of the spiritual and of the socio-political continues to be his engine. Even in this journey, he was figuring it out as he went, as most of us do. Yet his journey is documented in song. To get a snapshot of that, here are 20 great Bruce Cockburn songs that trace his development as an artist and as a person of conscience, demonstrating how these two supposed poles of spiritual and political are not poles at all.
***
Man of a Thousand Faces
Among the gentle folk-pop songs about musical friends and going to the country from 1970’s self-titled record, the prayer-like “Man of a Thousand Faces” is square one for Bruce Cockburn as a solo artist, thematically speaking; the seeker setting off on the suggestion of a path, not entirely sure where he’s going.
Clear and dexterous acoustic guitar lines establish his musical approach and provide a compelling interplay between shadows and light that suggest an internal struggle. The lyrics reveal more of his story; a person seeking a sense of personal clarity and definition, without much resolution in the end as to whether or not he’s found it. This sense of searching was the start of something important that’d he would continue to explore throughout his career.
Listen: Man of a Thousand Faces
Dialogue with the Devil
After another record that explores some of these same themes and also in a wintry jazz-folk vein, the path he started on led here; not a crossroads so much as a river delta. As if empathetic to that, Cockburn’s playing establishes his connection with blues great Mississippi John Hurt as his rural acoustic sound obliquely intersects with The Gospel of St. Matthew.
“Dialogue with the Devil” from 1972’s Sunwheel Dance is about a spiritual confrontation based on questions more than answers, which is why it is so compelling. The conflict isn’t resolved in this song as the narrator has to choose which direction to take for himself. His decision is hinted at rather than spelled out. But the artist’s level of artfulness to communicate that spiritual and even moral struggle is striking.
Listen: Dialogue with the Devil
Clocks Don’t Bring Tomorrow — Knives Don’t Bring Good News
Cockburn adds colour to his core sound on this central statement from 1973’s Night Vision. Leaving images of nature accompanied by acoustic textures behind for a bit, he wails on the electric guitar on this cut about what it means to confront The City — the noisy worlds of other people’s struggles while we’re in the middle of trying to figure out how to untangle ourselves from our own.
The ensemble playing here is exemplary, particularly Pat Godfrey’s gospel-tinged piano acting as a foil to Cockburn’s incendiary guitar and resigned vocal. “Clocks …” is the sound of an introspective man who knows he has to come out of his shell sooner or later, with that act being integral to satisfying the spiritual longing and sense of connection he’s pursued and sung about over four records by this point.
Listen: Clocks Don’t Bring Tomorrow — Knives Don’t Bring Good News
All the Diamonds in the World
The theme of questions instead of answers would endure on this track often cited as documenting Bruce Cockburn’s conversion to Christianity. As ecstatic and celebratory as this is, “All the Diamonds in the World” from 1974’s Sun, Salt, and Time contains those same shadows and light as before, suggesting that even with a sense of connection to the divine, one is at the beginning of the story and not the end.
This is a misty and impressionist interpretation of an experience that can’t be captured definitively, which is why the imagery is so powerfully evocative. Besides that, Cockburn’s seamless fusion of classical Renaissance music and modern folk-pop with a splash of analogue electronics is nothing short of breathtaking here, no matter where on the spiritual spectrum a listener sits.
Listen: All the Diamonds in the World
Gavin’s Woodpile
This one from 1976’s In the Falling Dark indicated a movement toward more outwardly applying his spirituality to the value of human life even when the powers that be do not. Cockburn’s guitar-work here is clear and crisp, punctuated by harmonics, and evoking the blues. It wrings out every drop of emotion as a secondary voice to his restrained yet outraged vocal addressing industry greed, poisoned environments, and systemic violence against Indigenous peoples, sadly all too relevant today.
Significantly, “Gavin’s Woodpile” does what several of Cockburn’s songs would go on to do; focus less on faceless policies and more on the people who are most drastically affected by them. Later, his impulse to rage against injustice would turn from visions of a life to come to actions rooted in the lives of real people in the present.
Listen: Gavin’s Woodpile
Creation Dream
Spirituality as celebration hinted at in “Dialogue with the Devil” is more fully realized here on the opening track of 1979’s Dancing in the Dragons Jaws, that album title suggesting the role of the spiritual person in a hostile world. Within that, “Creation Dream” is pure joy, evoking C.S Lewis’ Aslan singing the world into being.
Cockburn finds new levels of mythic grandeur here in this song about childlike wonder in the presence of the natural world as connected to the divine — his own take on the creation myth. Among other things, his singing on this is one of his best performances on record, accentuated by his amazingly fluid and melodic guitar that is his trademark by now, and further bolstered by Pat Godfrey’s marimba to give this tune an appropriately organic feel.
Listen: Creation Dream
Wondering Where the Lions Are
Instead of the creation of the world, Cockburn contemplates the end of it in this song written at the outset of Cold War fear mongering resurgence. As much as it suggests hope instead of fear with eternity in view, it still contains the fascist imagery of the young men marching/helmet shining in the sun/polished and precise like the brain behind the gun, which stands out even now as a grim reminder of the human tendency toward both factionalism and self-destruction.
A curious hit with those ideas abrading against each other, “Wondering Where the Lions Are” is still a prime candidate for a singalong with its appealingly loping reggae pulse, and wonderful call-and-response vocals. It’s full of the lifeforce, even as it hints at the end of the world as we know it. Also this: nice use of petroglyphs!
Listen: Wondering Where the Lions Are
Rumours of Glory
A defining track on the tellingly titled Humans album from 1980, Bruce Cockburn finds that reggae pulse again on “Rumours of Glory” with some incredible interplay between drummer Bob DiSalle and bassist Dennis Pendrith, and with a great instrumental hook from violinist Hugh Marsh. The Humans record is one about our foibles, particularly when we enter into conflict. Yet, it’s also celebratory, too.
This song is a prime example, concerning the hidden worlds inside of each person and behind each moment of our lives, and about seeing the divine spark in others. Something shines there like gold, but better. This is a love song broadly applied to everything and everyone around us, standing as one of Cockburn’s clearest statements about love in its wonderful complexity and mystery that would spur on another phase of his songwriting.
Listen: Rumours of Glory
Fascist Architecture
While contemplating love on an abstract scale, this song is about missing the beat on the more practical levels, shutting people out while we’re in our own heads. Also featured on Humans, this is a song about regret, recovery, renewal, and resolution, set to a meditative drone of a riff on which the verses are built. The instrumentation is a mix of acoustic, electric, and electronic, swelling into a flow that helps to provide something of a conclusion to the whole record about relationships, conflict, and human frailty.
Cockburn would record another version for the Waiting for a Miracle compilation, performing it often thereafter in the years to follow. This song is a powerful reminder as to what’s personally important amid more global concerns to help us stay out of our own heads, anchoring us in the matters of the heart and connection to others.
Listen: Fascist Architecture
Coldest Night of the Year
After a relationship breakdown, Bruce Cockburn moved to Toronto by 1981, which provided him with a rich environment for new sounds informed by jazz and radio-friendly rock rather than the pastoral folk of the past. This new milieu produced this song that appears on the Mummy Dust compilation; a tale of loneliness tempered with quiet contentment of simple pleasures.
“Coldest Night of the Year” features the City of Toronto as a main character in a sweet rumination about missing someone, starting again on one’s own, as well as a celebration of the simple joys of being in the moment. Characterized by a flowing R&B shuffle, this song is punctuated by Booker T-style organ, Hugh Marsh’s violin breezing in and out, and with Kathryn Moses’ weeping saxophone solo revealing the sorrow at the heart of it. Endearingly, it really sounds like he had a cold when he cut his vocal!
Listen: Coldest Night of the Year
The Trouble with Normal
The title track from Cockburn’s 1983 release, “The Trouble with Normal” documents the standard practices of the globalized world as the planet lurches to the right, dirty deals are struck, and as whole countries are moved around the geopolitical game board. This isn’t a protest song, so much as it is a challenge to our perceptions of world events and what happens when the reaction is a resigned shrug from the person in the street.
Fully embracing electric instrumentation, synths, pop-oriented feel and structure, and world-music punctuation, this album demonstrated a stylistic and thematic shift as Cockburn went to war-torn and politically disrupted global locations to see the effects of corrupt, self-serving policy outlined in this song for himself, and to meet the people directly impacted to challenge what normal really means when driven by toxic ideology.
Listen: The Trouble with Normal
Lovers in a Dangerous Time
Bruce Cockburn resolved to put love thy neighbour into practice on 1984’s pivotal Stealing Fire album. In doing so, his sound becomes more commercial as his lyrics become more direct and sometimes controversial, love songs and all. “Lovers in Dangerous Time” is a celebration of human resilience and connection in times of strife, full of shimmering electric guitar and a rhythm section that holds a meditative, mid-tempo groove.
The song touches on a key thematic thread found in Cockburn’s songbook — love as something to fight for and preserve, especially during times of ugliness and danger. That’s what gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight has always meant. This was covered by a few artists, Barenaked Ladies’ excellent take on it likely the most well-known.
Listen: Lovers in a Dangerous Time
If I Had a Rocket Launcher
When he visited a camp in Chiapas Mexico in early 1983, Bruce Cockburn was witness to the violence and everyday indignities suffered by Guatemalan refugees. As strong as love as a binding force is on the Stealing Fire record, this one explores another human impulse that Cockburn touched on in “Gavin’s Woodpile” — helpless rage, and what might have happened in a given moment if he wasn’t so helpless.
Despite its suggestion of violence, this is a song of immense compassion as well as one of anger, misunderstood at the time and often still is. Featuring one of his most easily identifiable guitar figures and lyrical sentiments, “…Rocket Launcher” helped define Cockburn’s artistic voice in the days when Central American conflicts were reflective of a loss of innocence in a politically polarized era.
Listen: If I Had a Rocket Launcher
Waiting for a Miracle
Another enduring theme in Cockburn’s work is celebrating the indomitable spirits of everyday people who work for change in places of conflict and corruption. A new track that also provides the title to 1987’s double retrospective, this song is a shining example of songs in that vein. In some ways, this cut is a continuation of what he explored on “Rumours of Glory” — the divine spark found in human beings who get on with things, while trying to impact change as best they can, even when the future seems abstract and out of reach.
“Waiting for a Miracle is characterized by a lilting reggae feel and punctuated by a soulful horn arrangement. Cockburn’s guitar spans the range between a bluesy growl and a contented croon, the call of his distinctive lead voice supported in sympathy with the answer of the backing vocals.
Listen: Waiting for a Miracle
Tibetan Side of Town
The beauty of the world and the simple pleasures to be enjoyed in it is yet another vital thread to follow in Cockburn’s songbook. This is particularly potent when juxtaposed with political and economic struggles. The songs “World of Wonders” and “Dust and Diesel” are great examples of that. “Tibetan Side of Town” takes this up a notch, featured on 1988’s Big Circumstance album.
An impressionistic snapshot of Katmandu and a kind of Bill Bryson-like travelogue all at once, Cockburn’s guitar work on this provides an example of some of his most impassioned playing yet on a song that’s about China’s oppression of Tibet as well as being about a night spent drinking tungba (a millet-based alcoholic beverage, served hot) with friends. “Tibetan Side of Town” is about people, not policy. That makes its political gravity all the more powerful.
Listen: Tibetan Side of Town
A Dream Like Mine
By 1991, Cockburn was back with his new record Nothing but a Burning Light, on which producer T-Bone Burnett worked with Cockburn on a stripped down, echoey, and darker sonic palette than is evident in his Eighties work. The approach would help set a template that he would continue to follow on subsequent records. “Dream Like Mine” opens the album, a song about the grandness of nature, yet in a more visceral and less ethereal way than his early work.
This song puts humanity right at the center, with nature providing a sacred connection to one’s origins and family in a way that Indigenous cultures celebrate, and European cultures do not. In this, “Dream Like Mine” is the culmination of that balance between spirituality, nature, and politics that Cockburn has explored throughout his career by this point.
Listen: A Dream Like Mine
Tie Me at the Crossroads
With some miles behind him as a songwriter and world-traveler, “Tie Me at the Crossroads” marks a turning point for Bruce Cockburn; from that of a seeker to a person in the position to serve as an example to others — a dispenser of advice even if it also contains a wink of the eye. Featured on 1994’s Dart to the Heart, this is a stop-and-reflect style song that’s full of humour more than sage insights — although here the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
It’s also tremendously fun to listen to, with a chorus that invites us all to sing along. That dynamic takes the focus off of Cockburn as a prophet of spiritual truth, and puts each of us in frame to seek out our own while never taking ourselves too seriously. It’s a masterful cut by a songwriter known for his deep well of political and spiritual consciousness, and for a fanbase that is sometimes too earnest by half when it’s time for a chuckle.
Listen: Tie Me at the Crossroads
Pacing the Cage
With lyrics that echo some of the sentiments found in “Man of a Thousand Faces”, “Pacing the Cage” dispels the myth that journeys are always linear, and that the things we pick up along the way will always help us to overcome our limitations. Taken from the excellent Charity of Night record from 1997, this is a song about vulnerability, uncertainty, and of feeling stuck in place.
Cockburn’s delivery reveals all of that, and also provides a contrast to his authoritative voice that so often rings with hard won wisdom. In this, “Pacing the Cage” is Cockburn’s most comforting song. It’s reflective of both the strengths and frailties of what it is to be a human being in a beautiful, confusing, brutal, and wondrous world where sometimes the best map will not guide us.
Listen: Pacing the Cage
Put it in Your Heart
A key track from 2003’s superb You’ve Never Seen Everything, “Put it in Your Heart” is as close to a conclusion to a spiritual journey as one might suppose, if there even is such a thing. Cockburn demonstrates everything he does best here with a vocal that demonstrates its full range, with a resonant 12-string guitar figure that binds the whole thing together.
It also ties other threads together explored in so many of his other songs— of love and connection with others being the key to changing the world for the better, and the means to counter terrible deeds done in the name of tunnel vision and fear of change. “Put it in Your Heart” is a song about transformation, and one of Cockburn’s most powerful calls to embracing it — not just individually, but as a civilization.
Listen: Put it in Your Heart
Call Me Rose
After slowing down his output of original material in the 2000s, Cockburn’s 2011 album Small Source of Comfort demonstrates his continuing growth as a songwriter. “Call Me Rose” is a character song and from their point of view — not a typical Cockburn approach at all. Even more off the beaten track, the person in question is a reincarnated Richard Nixon, now living the life of a single mother in the inner-city projects.
With a folk-blues, resonator guitar-driven backdrop, this is not a leftist revenge song so much as it is about the cost of having no empathy, and of treating mass populations as faceless numbers rather than as people. “Call Me Rose” is about power and the ruinous effects of both having too much, and not nearly enough. The framing of that is unique in Cockburn’s catalogue, and one of his most effective statements in the simplest of terms.
Listen: Call Me Rose
***
Runners up and bubbling under:
- Going to the Country
- One Day I Walk
- Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long
- A Long Time Love Song
- Lord of the Starfields
- Silver Wheels
- Outside a Broken Telephone Booth with Money in My Hand
- No Footprints
- How I Spent My Fall Vacation
- Tokyo
- Loner
- Planet of the Clowns
- Dust and Diesel
- Call it Democracy
- Don’t Feel Your Touch
- Child of the Wind
- Strange Waters
- Use Me While You Can
- Let the Bad Air Out
- Wait No More
- Stab at Matter
***
Bruce Cockburn is a masterful guitarist, songwriter, and conveyor of potent ideas that center around how spirituality, politics, and social change converge. Yet, even within that, he doesn’t forget about humanity at the center of it all, characterized by inconsistency, personal flaws, and humour as much as by its indominable spirit.
Across over 30 albums, he’s shown himself in his work across that spectrum and employing a range of musical styles, with these elements making his songs resonant outside of their writer. The entwined themes that listeners find from his earliest works to his latest are highly relatable as well as deeply personal to Cockburn himself, less a straight line from question to answer, and more of a mosaic that reveals the wonderful complexities in between.
~~~
Learn more about Bruce Cockburn at brucecockburn.com
To dig a bit deeper into his discography, learn about some of the details behind these songs and others, check out cockburnproject.net
