BRUCE COCKBURN

Interview By James Jensen

Bruce Cockburn has been delighting and confounding his loyal fans and music critics for over two decades and 20+ albums.  The Canadian songwriter became a national hero in the seventies crafting folk music laced with gentle imagery of love and spirituality. He collected no less than a half a dozen JUNO awards (Canada's version of the Grammy) and the end of that decade saw his first U.S. chart success with "Wondering Where the Lions Are" (see the July/Aug. issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine for transcription ).

Just as chart success and a larger audience in the states seemed within his grasp, he changed musical directions by going electric and dabbling in Reggae and dance oriented Rock-n-Roll.  The radical shift in musical direction was in support of the change in lyrical content of his songs which became increasingly political in nature.  Cockburn (pronounced Co-burn) hit stride again commercially and artistically in the mid-eighties with the album "Stealing Fire", which contained the popular "If I Had a Rocket Launcher". 

Part of the lack of awareness in Cockburn by the vast record consuming population in the US may be in part due to the poor availability of his recordings, however that changed in 1991 with the worldwide release of "Nothing But a Burning Light " on Columbia/Sony. That album, recorded in the U.S. and featuring guests like Jackson Browne and Booker T. Jones, was awarded the Associated Press "Record of the Year".  Even better news is Columbia's decision to release his entire back catalogue on compact disc and cassette .

While Cockburn has gained a strong reputation for the lyrical content of his songs (to the point of even being quoted by U2 in their song "God Part II") his guitar playing has never suffered from neglect. Virtuosos like Michael Hedges and Phil Keaggy have recognized his influence.  On most of Cockburn's albums in the 70's, not only did he produce wonderfully creative and challenging guitar accompaniments for his songs but most of his titles that decade contained one, if not two solo instrumental pieces, displaying not only an incredible technique but real compositional skill.

I met with Cockburn at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles in the spring of 93.  He was mixing his next two projects: An acoustic based collection called: Bruce Cockburn, The Christmas Album, due for release this fall and Dart to the Heart due early 94.

JJ. Was an acoustic guitar your first instrument?

BC. Well literally it was but I was interested at first in playing electric guitar and as soon as I could convince my parents that I should get a guitar I got an old Kay arch-top which in fact was an acoustic until I put a D armond pickup on it. I always maintained a certain amount of interest in the acoustic side of things. This was when I was fourteen and I was interested in playing Rock n Roll but the guy I was taking lessons from was more of the Chet Atkins school.

JJ. That's where the fingerstyle came from?

BC. No , I didn't learn any fingerstyle from him it was all with a flat pick but that style of music was sort of injected into the equation , the sort of country swing kind of thing that led to my introduction to Jazz and other types of music . I was still thinking of only electric guitar but late in high school I fell in with a bunch of folkies who were into country blues and ragtime and that kind of stuff and that's when I started to fingerpick. My picking style hasn't really changed at all ,the right hand technique is the same as it was then. My style is basically a combination of Big Bill Broonzy and Mississippi John Hurt or Mance Lipscomb...

JJ. The monotonic bass?

BC. The thumb drone or an alternating bass . You sort of have one or the other and Mississippi John Hurt was a great source of direction , I guess would be the way to put it , because of the beautiful and simple way he used to put the melody over the alternating bass . I mean he just played the melody of the song,and that was like no body else I had heard , it wasn't just licks , it was the actual melody. That sort of opened up a whole new thing and because of my interest in Jazz and other types of music that all got added in so when you take that same sort of right hand technique and apply it to a more complex musical approach you end up with something like what I do.

JJ. "Keep It Open", is a song on your first album where the melody part of your guitar accompaniment could stand alone as an instrumental, you're not just playing chords behind your vocals.

BC. That's pretty much how I write too, the melodies come from the guitar. I don't really hear melodies in my head very well until they start to take shape on the instrument.

JJ. So you are composing through your hands rather than in advance with your head?

BC. Yeah, very much so. When I write lyrics I may have a rhythmic concept or even a rudimentary melody in my head but it always changes completely when the guitar comes into the picture.

JJ. Was most of your playing at that time in standard tuning?

BC. Yeah , I used then and still do alot of dropped D but it is usually one or the other. There are a couple of other tunings I use but they came later. On " Sunwheel Dance" the title track is in Open D (DADF#AD) where another influence came into my style and on the album "Night Vision" there is a similar instrumental tune called "Foxglove" (see transcription) . Both of those were inspired by a guy named Fox Watson who played fiddle tunes on guitar with the alternating bass and used open tunings to very good effect. Eventually I guess he felt that the fiddle tunes were better on a fiddle than the guitar and he started playing fiddle instead. I haven't seen him for a really long time but he was a very fine guitar player and that opened up another door for me and that's why I titled the song "Foxglove" to honor him.

JJ. Your first few albums sound like you had quite varied musical influences at that time?

BC. The influences were alot more obvious on the earlier albums, the Incredible String Band was an influence, Renaissance music per say , and alot of ethnic music from around the world. I went through a period when I listened to every different culture I could find and alot of that ended up in one way or another in my writing.

JJ. At that point were you touring as a solo or with a band?

BC. I was hardly touring at all. I played in bands for the second half of the sixties but by the end of the sixties I was doing mostly solo work and the touring those days was pretty limited for me, I had like four or five places I could go. When the first album got out and things gradually built up I began traveling alot. I lived the first half of the seventies out of a camper truck and went back and forth across Canada, I didn't play outside Canada really. Little by little I built up an audience , but it wasn't until the album "In the Falling Dark" came out that I had got sufficiently fed up with my own company and thought I better start adding people to the stage show. That folkie /Jazzy group is the one on "Circles in the Stream" the live album from 1977, that was the first band I had.

JJ. Your guitar arrangements were very dense compared to a lot of singer,songwriters of that time was that just your style or did you feel that you had to keep it busy being a solo.

BC. Well it was both, when I first started playing things like Beatles songs solo you had to think of some way to make it move the way the record moves or it's really boring if your just strumming chords. I tried to make the guitar function as a band as best as I could so that's part of the thinking and the fingerpicking and the development of my style. That actually has led to a peculiar relationship with bands that I do have because I still basically work that way when I write a song so when I invite other people in to it to play they have to find a way around that busy guitar part which causes difficulties sometimes but usually produces some interesting results.

JJ. "Islands In a Black Sky" off your fourth album "Night Vision" sounds alot like Michael Hedges.

BC. If you ask Michael Hedges he would probably tell you it reminded him of him too because he has publicly said he owes something to my early stuff but I haven't discussed it with him really.

JJ. You were creating the sound of two instruments with all the left hand hammers and pulls opposing your right hand.

BC. I can't really say I was trying to create the sound of two guitars specifically but just trying to get parts that moved together and are interesting . You use whatever technique you discover , most of that kind of stuff comes from just fooling around on the guitar and I'll stumble on something that is worth pursuing and things like that come out of it.

JJ. That album also contained a very traditional ragtime sounding piece "The Blues Got The World ...." but "Deja Vu" and " Lightstorm" ....

BC. That was the Jazz coming back, I was never disciplined enough to be a Jazz player but I listened to an awful lot of it and I played a lot of it in a certain way so that was bound to show up sooner or later too. That's partly responsible for the modal kind of approach to chord structure and all that which was characteristic of the Jazz that I liked in the sixties like Coltrane. The Jazz players of that era were getting influenced by music of other cultures ,Indian and Arabic music and so was I.

JJ. You mention that alot of your music comes from finding a lick on the guitar and expanding it but I believe you had a formal education at the Berklee School ?

BC. Yeah , I went to Berklee for a couple of years , well actually for three semesters out of a four year course (laughs) all the best people dropped out. I had a fair amount of formal training and quite alot of theory training and a few years of piano . I'm able to read music and when I was in High School it hadn't occurred to me to write songs but I was trying to compose instrumental music in the Jazz mode. I wrote a rather naive Jazz mass that was performed at a local church and which I'm sure if I could get a tape of now would be big laughs for all concerned. At Berklee I majored in composition so I got as far as learning how to make Big Band arrangements like Glenn Miller style of things and then I dropped out to play Rock n Roll. That same crowd that I had got the fingerpicking from were putting together a Rock band back in Ottawa and they needed an organ player , and I had enough keyboard knowledge to play what passed for organ parts in those days , so that was the first band I was in. That's the point where I really started writing songs, I had written two songs before I joined them but it was in that band that was committed to doing original material that I sort of was encouraged to write alot and I spent the second half of the sixties writing for a bunch of different bands I was in. Then I decided that all the songs sounded better if I played them by myself. (laughs)

JJ. I guess the point I'm getting at is if your pieces begin with noodling around on the guitar is there a point where you bring in your formal training to finish a piece or to get yourself out of trouble if your hands don't find it or is it pretty much hand and ear all the way?

BC. It's pretty much hand and ear, it's hunting around for something that feels right and carries the words the right way. Sometimes a set of words will go through a couple of kinds of music before they settle in the right place . In the last few years I have started to think more melodically and try to build melodies because I went through a period in the mid-eighties where I was not really thinking about that . I was trying to write songs that went beyond the normal song structure so there's alot of stuff with talking in it and just rhythmic patterns over which the songs happen and so on but since the writing for "Big Circumstance" I've felt I should explore melody more closely something I might characterize as singable melodies, things that somebody who couldn't play an instrument could still get a handle on enough to sing to themselves.

JJ. Getting back to your albums of the 70's "Salt, Sun and Time " seems heavily Jazz influenced....

BC. That album came out of a phase that involved a heavy infatuation with Django Reinhardt.

JJ. Were you still playing fingerstyle or did you get a pick out and try to...

BC. No , no I didn't try to get his tone I couldn't get his tone in a million years and still play more than one note at once but it just leaked in , when I talk about these influences with the exception of the country blues guys that I actually did imitate to try to learn their songs the other influences are more subtle than that, they're in the music but they aren't the result of sitting down and trying to learn Reinhardt solos note for note or anything like that it's just like absorbing the feel and sound of it and having some come through.

JJ. "Skylarking" , an instrumental on "Joy will find a way" is in open Eb tuning?

BC. Well it's actually in standard tuning except that the A string is tuned to Bb and the E string is tuned to Eb so you have bass notes of the key of Eb under your thumb and the rest of it's played on standard tuned strings.

JJ. That piece has a mix of picked and strummed notes , do you use a flamenco style rasqueado strum?

BC. I don't know that term , I whack the strings ! But it's controlled, I keep my hand kind of curled up and brace my little finger on the top , the thumb is picking bass notes .

JJ. Do you ever use a plectrum?

BC. I never use a pick.

JJ. For single note runs...

BC. I'll use whatever is handy , If my thumb is busy playing bass notes I'll use my first two digits but otherwise I'll use my thumb and index finger for a single string run.

JJ. Why do you brace your little finger on the soundboard?

BC. That's what all the folkies did and that's what I did. It's not just a bad habit , I used to think for awhile it was a bad habit and tried to correct myself of it at one point but I gave up on that because the feel of that kind of fingerpicking needs an anchor, the thumb has to be so rock solid and able to come down on the strings in a way that if your hand is free floating .....I might be missing something , but I can't recall anybody I've heard that doesn't brace getting that feel.

JJ. That's what I've been doing wrong.

BC. That's probably what it is. You gain alot more mobility by not bracing though. I find it a nuisance in the finger part of the picking because it's hard to get at the strings but the trade off isn't worth it , I'd rather not be able to do the runs and get the feel.

JJ. Going back to songs like "Dialogue With the Devil" your playing a jazzy/bluesy lead on top of a pounding bass , was that independence hard to master?

BC. Well you take your basic country blues and stick more notes in it. It did take a long time to get and I am basically an undisciplined person so I spent quite a while trying to fingerpick before I actually understood what the thumb had to do to make it work . At first I had a kind of wishy washy style that was good for a certain kind of effect like if you wanted alot of flowing arpeggio stuff it worked but I never could get that rhythm happening. I don't remember the source of the discovery for me that the thumb had to be solid for the rhythm but I remember when the Kweskin Jug Band was happening Jim Kweskin was known as Led Thumb cause he had this rock-solid thumb thing happening that you almost didn't have to put something on top of because it would cook so hard. It is still an ongoing quest to keep the feel going and do other stuff on top and depending on what your doing quite challenging.

JJ. "Hand Dancing" on "Joy Will Find A Way" is a fun piece with alot of that solid thumb bass and lead on top picking.

BC. That was sort of an instrumental piece with lyrical accompaniment.

JJ. "In The Falling Dark" has a couple of instrumental pieces ;"Giftbearer" sounds like your just playing rhythm while the horn is taking the lead.

BC. Well ,actually through all the improvised part I was playing the rhythm but (demonstrating the piece on his dobro) I was also playing the lead on top of this pattern although the horn tends to hide the guitar part.

JJ. The song "Joy Will Find A Way" has an interesting rhythm pattern.

BC. That is actually based on an Ethiopian thumb harp piece.

JJ. That brings up another question; alot of your songs feature a fairly complicated rhythmic pattern with your right hand,does that create difficulty when you sing on top of it?

BC. Not once you learn it (laughs) there are things that are hard to sing and play at the same time but it's usually because the singing is demanding something that takes your mind off the playing more than the other way around.

JJ. You tend to feature one or two instrumentals on each of your records was that your intention or did lyrics just not fit the music?

BC. They were never intended to have lyrics. I always have the lyrics first so that the tunes that have lyrics are constructed around them.

JJ. So you work from the lyric first?

BC. Almost always.

JJ. Are the music / tab books published on your music fairly accurate?

BC. The first one I thought was very accurate as far as I could judge. They spent a lot of time looking very hard at what I was doing and asked me a lot of questions about it and the feedback I've got is that it's pretty accurate.

JJ. At the time of "In The Falling Dark" you started touring with a band , was that due to your popularity or did you want to create the other parts in your shows?

BC. It was literally because I was tired of playing solo. The particular form the band took was due in part because of the content of that album so it's acoustic bass and hand percussion and mostly acoustic guitar with a pickup that you hear more later in the show as the strings die.

JJ. The live album that this first group played on "Circles In The Stream " contained a couple of fresh guitar solo instrumentals.

BC. "Deer Dancing around a Broken Mirror" is dropped D tuning I think capoed at the second fret and "Cader Idris " is a piece I really like and I don't know what you'd call it but the G string is tuned down to F#.

JJ. You used that tuning on "Fascist Architecture" and "Badlands Flashback" .

BC. On the" Big Circumstance " albumI used that tuning on "Understanding Nothing " and " Don't Feel Your Touch".

JJ. Was "Cader Idris" a very difficult piece for you to play?

BC. I don't think so because I got used to doing that arpeggio thing with the fingers and something else with the thumb and they are reasonably independent. "Foxglove".for instance has all those triplets over an alternating bass that to me was an obvious thing to do but some people find it challenging but maybe that's because they're learning it after the fact. "Cader Idris " is basically the same thing except its in a different time signature so they're not triplets they're eighth notes and the thumb instead of playing an alternating bass is playing a harmonized melody.

JJ. "Further Adventures Of.." features the instrumental track "Red Ships Take Off In The Distance" with acoustic bass and guitar..

BC. Bob Boucher the bass player and I did a lot of touring as a duo around that time and we developed some duet type pieces which that was one .

JJ. "Bright Sky" has a very unusual guitar accompaniment.

BC. That's based , or I shouldn't say based on but the idea came from a record of Swedish fiddle music that I had that was duets and they did a lot of that stepping up kind of harmony that you hear.

JJ. "Dancing In The Dragon's Jaws" didn't have any instrumental pieces but it was very much driven by the sound of your acoustic guitar and seems to be a fitting end to your string of acoustic based albums of the 70's . It was certainly your most popular album to date is it one of your favorites?

BC. I don't really have favorite albums , I think that was a good one and it is probably better than some of the other ones but your right in that it was a cummulation of what I was doing through the 70's and that is fitting for an album that came at the end of that time and the acoustic based Jazz influenced thing didn't die there but it was kind of the last major expression of it. I then started going after something more rhythmic and band oriented and hard edged.

JJ. Before we leave that album "Creation Dream" is a favorite of mine do you still play it?

BC. Yeah, I still play it cause it's fun to play and sort of dramatic and relatively easy to execute as those type of things go. It also doesn't have as many words as "Tibetan Side Of Town" so it suits the live situation well although I do that one live as well.

JJ. In the 80's with "Humans" you really seemed to be hungry for a change of sound.

BC. I had been listening to Reggae and Punk music and I'd started to travel outside North America in the later 70's and that effected the content of the lyrics and a lot of other stuff that was happening in my life effected that as well. Like I said before the music in my songs is in support of the lyrics so the nature of the lyrics has alot to do with what the music ends up sounding like. Some kinds of thoughts don't suit the acoustic style that I'd been using and I wanted to learn to play electric guitar. I wanted to have bands that sort of kicked-ass a little more than I had been doing and it's an inevitable escalation once you have a band because you want drums and once you have drums you want electric bass and once you've got that going you better be playing electric guitar or you won't hear anything that your doing. We've licked that problem a lot in the last few years but in the late 70's and early 80's there were no guitar pickups that were any good for acoustic guitar, at least none that sounded anything like an acoustic guitar , so that was part of it too. I really wanted to play Reggae music and Rock n Roll and I wanted to make people get up and dance .

JJ. The album " Stealing Fire " saw acoustic guitar creep back into prominence on several tracks what brought that about?

BC. Some of those pieces I wrote on acoustic guitar, if I happen to be holding an electric guitar in my hand when I get an idea it'll probably end up on the record. A lot of the songs on my current album ( tentatively titled "Dart to the Heart" ) were written in hotel rooms and dressing rooms on the last tour so they're written on acoustic guitar because that's what I had at the time . When I'm at home and I have my stuff all set-up and plugged in I might write more on the electric. A lot of "Big Circumstance" was written traveling and that's why the acoustic had a bigger role again on that record.

JJ. You only dabble in alternate tunings any particular reason?

BC. Yeah the reason is that a lot of the people I heard using alternate tunings were very boring because they used the same fingerings and the same picking patterns in all their tunings and used the tunings to get variety which is a kind of specious way to get variety cause you end up with a sameness to the style and I found that I didn't gravitate to the tunings for that reason. It is not that I refuse to use alternate tunings it's just that I didn't find them attractive for that reason partly. There is one tuning that use a lot of and that's open C (CGCGCE) tuning that I got from the Rev. Gary Davis . I used that tuning on "Foxglove" and "Soul of A Man " from the last album , "Rainfall" on "Further Adventures of... " it's a rich sounding tuning and you get a lot of octaves naturally so you can get a kind of twelve-string effect without the clumsiness or cumbersome nature of that instrument. It's a tuning I was told by a Chilean friend of mine who thought he was introducing me to it when he said, " I've got this tuning from the south of Chile and only women use it" and it was the same C tuning, so I guess if I use it down there I'd have to apologize first.

JJ. The album "Nothing But a Burning Light" introduced a new producer (T. Bone Burnett) and a new flavor or sound including Dobro.

BC. "Soul Of A Man" is a long time favorite of mine and I'd played it live but never recorded it but T Bone asked me in pre-production if I had any other things I could think of to record and it just came to mind because of the content of the song and the style seemed to fit what we were doing. That album was a conscious attempt to get at singable melodies that didn't count on a guitar part to make them work which made the songs structurally simpler. It struck me at one point that I almost had no songs a non musician could just sit around and sing and I thought that was a kind of an absence and I'd rather be remembered for having songs that people could sing at a party or whatever. It seemed like their was a bit of a gap there and I was trying to address it and still am on the current album. ( I was told that this album will be a first in that it contains only love songs )

JJ. Do you like the additional time the CD format allows you on a project?

BC. It's a kind of neutral factor , I don't think there's any obligation to fill the time slot . The album should consist of the right number of songs that feel right together and should build and climax like any other work of art . I've always approached the structuring of an album the way I would approach putting together a book where the songs should make sense following each other and there's a kind of pleasing up and down motion to it . I also look for a unity of songs on some level. Sometimes you record 15 songs and some don't fit the overall mood that is established and they get tossed.

JJ. Are you pleased that Columbia/Sony is releasing your back catalogue on CD and cassette?

BC. Yeah I'm glad , the only down side is people are requesting songs that I can't remember!

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