{"id":231514,"date":"2019-09-19T02:05:53","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T06:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=231514"},"modified":"2019-09-19T02:05:53","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T06:05:53","slug":"bruce-cockburn-avoids-impulse-to-get-political-with-lyric-less-new-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/09\/19\/bruce-cockburn-avoids-impulse-to-get-political-with-lyric-less-new-album\/","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Cockburn avoids impulse to get political with lyric less new album"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
If anyone is looking for activist folk singer Bruce Cockburn to deliver a passionate lyrical rebuke for our tumultuous times, they’re not going to find it on his newest album. (File Photo By Janet Spinas Dancer – originally posted to Flickr as Bruce Cockburn on the Legacy Stage, CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

TORONTO \u2014\u00a0If anyone is looking for activist folk singer Bruce Cockburn to deliver a passionate lyrical rebuke for our tumultuous times, they’re not going to find it on his newest album.<\/p>\n

The 74-year-old musician has a respected history in the craft of protest songs, but he’s not taking the bait anymore. He doesn’t find inspiration in the anger that’s spewed by the U.S. president, he says, nor does he feel the necessity to acknowledge the latest outrage.<\/p>\n

Half a century into his career, the songwriter behind “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,”\u00a0“Lovers in a Dangerous Time”\u00a0and “If a Tree Falls”\u00a0might seem a little jaded \u2014\u00a0but he sees it differently.<\/p>\n

“I’m more frustrated than fired up,”\u00a0he explains while sitting in the lobby of a Toronto hotel.<\/p>\n

“I’ve gotten angry so many times over so many things. Really the stuff that would make me angry now is all the same.”<\/p>\n

Cockburn acknowledges that might be him showing his age. The energy that once fuelled his inner fire is being redirected, mostly to raising his young daughter. The Ottawa-born musician, who resides in San Francisco with his wife, also walks with a cane due to hip and foot problems.<\/p>\n

Cockburn says he doesn’t want to recycle the agita that established him in the Canadian cultural canon. It seems he would rather seek solace from today’s political discord in the strings of his acoustic guitar.<\/p>\n

On his 34th album “Crowing Ignites,”\u00a0due for release on Sept. 20, Cockburn lets the music do the talking. The all-instrumental project is his first since “Speechless,”\u00a0a wordless collection of mostly covers of his own songs released 15 years ago that firmly established Cockburn as a formidable picker. His latest further entrenches his skills beyond the written word.<\/p>\n

But “Crowing Ignites”\u00a0isn’t an island of work. The collection of 11 original tracks plays like a meditation on our careless existence, though it leaves most of its interpretation up to the listener.<\/p>\n

Cockburn offers some direction in the song’s titles: “April in Memphis,”\u00a0evokes the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and “Blind Willie”\u00a0is an homage to pre-Depression era American gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson, whose troubled life led to an early death at 48.<\/p>\n

“Seven Daggers,”\u00a0named in reference to Roman Catholic imagery of the Virgin Mary, is a dreamy journey where Cockburn’s guitar lingers among the sounds of kalimbas. And the hypnotic “Bells of Gethsemane,”\u00a0takes his instrument drifting along a sea of Tibetan cymbals, chimes and singing bowls.<\/p>\n

“To me, the nature of instrumental music is that it exists on its own terms,”\u00a0Cockburn explains.<\/p>\n

“It may suggest things to you, or conjure up feelings, but you can’t really control how it does that.”<\/p>\n

Yet it’s difficult to separate “Crowing Ignites”\u00a0from the social fabric it’s built from, which makes Cockburn’s insistence on ambiguity all the more bewildering.<\/p>\n

When asked about politics, he offers a clearer sense of what might’ve led him to return to instrumentals. He expresses dismay over how “polarization”\u00a0and “fragmentation”\u00a0have split people along political party lines and isolated both sides from each other.<\/p>\n

“The whole idea that liberal and conservative have become pejorative \u2014\u00a0they’re not descriptive terms anymore, they’re labels to refer to people you hate. How can you have dialogue when the language can’t accommodate a different point of view?”\u00a0Cockburn says.<\/p>\n

“Maybe that was in the background somewhere in the choice of doing an instrumental album. It wasn’t conscious. But we have to do our best to promote community and dialogue.”<\/p>\n

It’s one of the reasons he hasn’t released a song about Donald Trump, who he believes promotes “chaos.”\u00a0He refuses to give the U.S. president any more oxygen.<\/p>\n

“The world is talking about Donald Trump by his invitation \u2014\u00a0he doesn’t need any more attention,”\u00a0he says.<\/p>\n

Cockburn hopes for the sake of his eight-year-old daughter the world digs itself out of its troubled state.<\/p>\n

“In a way, I feel guilty for having had a kid, not from the point of view of population, but for inflicting the future on that child,”\u00a0he says.<\/p>\n

“I worry about that. But I probably won’t even be here when she’s hitting the worst of that, so it’s kind of hard to think of it in concrete terms.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2014\u00a0If anyone is looking for activist folk singer Bruce Cockburn to deliver a passionate lyrical rebuke for our tumultuous …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":231517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","mauthors-david-friend","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231520,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231514\/revisions\/231520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}