IN CONCERT
What: Bruce Cockburn with Nefe
Where: Alix Goolden Performance Hall
When: Friday, 8 p.m. (doors at 7)
Tickets: $65.50 at Livenation.com or 1-888-732-1682
From the beginning of his career, Bruce Cockburn was recognized as an integral part of the Canadian music scene. Four decades later, the accolades are still pouring in for the environmentally conscious folk singer.
Cockburn, 72, was added to the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame last week in a ceremony in Calgary, joining the likes of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
Cockburn is no stranger to awards, having won a dozen Junos. But he’s still writing, recording and touring new material. Two days after he accepted his hall of fame award, the San Francisco-based singer-songwriter played a concert that launched a 38-date tour in support of his 33rd album, Bone on Bone.
Career-capping honours — such as the People’s Voice Award he received in 2017 at Folk Alliance International, one of the world’s top music-industry conferences — often signal the end for an artist. But retirement is something the Lovers in a Dangerous Time songwriter doesn’t think about much.
“I think about the process of writing the next one,” Cockburn said recently, during an interview with the Calgary Herald. “What’s done is done. The value reflecting on those things has on me as a writer is chiefly to avoid the mistakes of the past or to just do things better, make things more clear, more interesting, more whatever.”
Cockburn has sold more than seven million records worldwide, a total buoyed during the early days by political statements such as 1984’s If I Had a Rocket Launcher and 1988’s If A Tree Falls. His music is no less confrontational — or successful — these days, especially with U.S. President Donald Trump offering up a continuous stream of songwriting fodder. Following its release, Bone on Bone hit No. 1 on the iTunes singer-songwriter chart.
The singer-songwriter said he does not directly reference Trump on Bone on Bone, his first album in seven years. He does give a shout-out to poet Al Purdy, who lived in Victoria prior to his death in 2000. The upbeat song 3 Al Purdys is what Cockburn produced when he was asked to compose a song for a documentary about the Canadian icon, and he liked it so much he included it on Bone on Bone.
“It’s something I don’t do very much of,” Cockburn told the Calgary Herald, explaining his unusual approach to writing a song about a homeless man obsessed with Purdy.
“I don’t want to say I’ve never done that before, because that’s probably not true, but nothing comes to mind that compares at the moment: To be a different character, but still be my song. In this case, I imagined myself being that guy in the song. Then it was easy to write him thinking about it that way.”
At this stage in his career, Cockburn is more interested in writing about Canada than he is the U.S.
“I think Canada punches well above its weight in terms of the quality of songwriting that comes out of this country, relative to the size of the population,” Cockburn told reporters after his hall of fame induction.
“When you think how much we were influenced by English pop music in the ’60s and American pop music forever, there’s a lot of American pop music that is actually Canadian. And a lot of that is not pop, but has more serious intent than what often gets called pop music [that] comes from here, and I’m proud of that.”
