Straight to the Heart

Bruce Cockburn lives in an artist’s dream world. No, the Canadian singer-songwriter has never enjoyed mass market appeal. Although he has put out the average of one album a year since his debut in 1969, his songs regularly do not make radio play lists (with one exception: "Wondering Where the Lions Are," a top-40 hit in 1980). But maybe that is the key. There is nothing quite like becoming a commodity to send your creative energy into a funk. Pop success has an early expiration date before it starts to turn sour.

What Cockburn does have is a remarkably loyal cult following that translates into a solid commercial base. It frees him to experiment with diverse musical styles and to pursue his unconventional passions. (Who else could get away with calling a song "Burden of the Angel/Beast"?)

Cockburn is presently touring the United States and Europe to promote the release of his most recent work, Dart to the Heart. The album is a juicy slice of tunes that stylistically cut across the breadth of his rich musical catalog. Musings about a spirit-infused world of wonders are juxtaposed with hard-hitting political analysis, all caressed by gentle love songs. It is a bag of contradictions, to be sure. But that is his honest read on human experience.

"Writing music, for me, is about touching something deep in someone else from a real place in yourself," Bruce told me before a recent San Francisco gig. "It can be done with a mood; it doesn’t have to be done with ideas or direct statements."

Not that he takes anything even resembling a cavalier attitude toward his lyrics. His words are poetry in motion, as is reflected in this 1974 beauty: "All the diamonds in this world/That mean anything to me/Are conjured up by wind and sunlight/Sparkling on the sea."

Indeed, Bruce deeply believes in words and their meanings, something many of today’s cultural so-phisticates might consider quaint. All the more reason for him to lament how mass media "have cheapened language and make it nearly impossible to speak with subtlety."

Wearing the persona of an English professor, Bruce turns to an example off the new album: "You wouldn’t believe how many people do not see the difference between ‘listen to the laugh’ and ‘listen for the laugh.’ They are totally different things. When I am doing a radio interview these days, people often say, ‘Hey, I really liked your song, "Listen to the Laugh."’ But what laugh is he listening to? If you’re listening for it you haven’t heard it yet!"

As he talks, I am sure that he is spinning off Herbert Marcuse’s 1960s clas-sic, One Dimension-al Man. Mass culture has impaired our capacity to interpret life on a series of levels. "No," he responds, "I’ve never read the book, but I am aware that our reality changed drastically with the introduction of mass communication. That is why distilling the truth of your experience into a song is such an act of subversion."

That moves us like a dart to his heart. He is not ready to abandon the idea of shared meaning because he feels there is too much at stake. Storytelling, and the language that goes with it, are the vehicles he uses to talk about the complexities of life.

WALK through Cockburn’s discography and the signs are everywhere. During the early 1970s, his songs were immersed in the stream of intense spiritual experiences. Although religion had been a part of his childhood, it was very cold and formal. "I went to Sunday school as a kid because it was a social convention," he recalls. "My parents were agnostic and still are, yet they sent us to church because they did not want the neighbors to think we were weird....So I grew up surrounded by the imagery and hearing the stories, but not having it charged with any meaning."

In his early 20s, he embarked on a more personal spiritual journey. He flirted with Buddhism for a while and then got slightly more involved in the occult. No one was more surprised than he when his search led him back to Christianity.

It began with a reading of The Narnia Chronicles (the C.S. Lewis fantasy tales) and culminated with a mystical experience at his own church wedding. "At the moment we were saying our vows, there was an overwhelming impression that there was someone standing there that I could not see....It was Jesus. All of a sudden it hit me, ‘Oh, so we aren’t talking just about books here, we are talking about something very tangible.’"

At first he had trouble making sense of his new faith. The message that came across in his music was, frankly, a bit on the simplistic side. "It was new to me and I was trying to explore what it was I had experienced," he admits. "I got as close as I will ever get to being a fundamentalist. But it didn’t take."

Bruce reached noticeable maturity by his 1976 album, In the Falling Dark. Creative growth was happening instrumentally as well. A distinctive jazz beat was added to his trademark folk guitar. "Lord of the Starfields" and "Silver Wheels," songs that fans still tirelessly request in concert, can be found on this album. But it is the title song that speaks of Bruce’s rendezvous with doubt and ambiguity: "Earthbound while everything expands/Slipping from hand to hand/Catching the light and falling into the dark/The world fades out like an overheard remark/In the falling dark."

Ironically, Bruce experienced that uncertainty to be quite liberating. "I discovered that dogma is the real spiritual enemy," he says. "It’s an ego thing, to fear what you cannot control. I began to move toward a spirituality that was about freedom and openness and love."

BEFORE LONG BRUCE’S spiritual trek crossed new borders. His brother gave him a book of poetry written by Sandinista priest Ernesto Cardenal. He read it while on a holiday in the Canary Islands, then promptly wrote "Tropic Moon," a flaming arrow aimed at the U.S.-financed war in Nicaragua. It was Cardenal’s writing, along with a report alleging persecution of the church in Nicaragua, that motivated Bruce to travel to Central America to do some investigative reporting on his own.

On his first visit, he felt an immediate connection with the people of Central America. "It was a deep sea change that affected everything. Initially, it produced three or four songs that ended up on the Stealing Fire album. But, more importantly, it was a step toward increasing my understanding of how things work in the world, and how to get involved to change it."

A Canadian, he says, knows what it means to be a dominated colony. "Since we don’t have a great deal of economic power, most of our industries and resources are owned by foreigners, a lot of which are based in the United States. So there is only a limited amount we, too, can do to control our destiny."

Bruce’s memory jogs back to a game he and his brother used to play as young boys: Castro vs. Batista in the bush. It makes me laugh. While my own brother and I were shooting down Indians on the prairie in rural Illinois, Bruce and his brother were up in Canada playing revolution. Bruce got to play Castro, of course, since he was older. So his turn toward social awareness is not as abrupt as it may seem.

Along with a sharper political edge in the ’80s came a harder sound driven by electric guitar. "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" represents this vintage Cockburn mix. It is a seething tale of revenge written after his dramatic visit to a refugee camp in Chiapas, Mexico. Another song off the same Stealing Fire album, "Call It Democracy," roars about the economic lot of the powerless. Calling the International Monetary Fund that "dirty MF," Bruce pulls no punches indicting capital institutions that are "turning countries into labour camps."

Today he fears that recent "free trade agreements" are doing the same to Canada. "It has been held out as this great panacea, everyone will all of a sudden have a job and unlimited access to American markets. Of course, it isn’t working out that way; a lot of people are losing their jobs."

Whenever he gets going on one of these raps, he stops and reminds himself that he is only an artist. He is wary of passing himself off as a political spokesperson, painfully aware that musicians sometimes take their role too seriously. He points to Sting. As much as he respects the time and energy Sting has put into rain forest preservation, he wonders at what point the hype of his campaign has overshadowed any real achievements. "Soon people start saying, ‘Hey, we went to the Sting or Cockburn concert, we’ve done our bit for the rain forest!’"

I tell Bruce about being in El Salvador with U2’s Bono and watching fighter pilots drop bombs on a village in the distance. We stewed in our anger and sadness. Bono tried to capture that moment in "Bullet the Blue Sky." The song closes with an ironic twist, "...into the arms of America." The first time I heard U2 play the song in concert, the crowd erupted into cheers and raised their fists at the end of the song, simply because Bono had said "America." The irony had been lost. The powerlessness I felt in El Salvador returned.

"Well, I don’t think Bono was very clear on that song," Bruce says with characteristic bluntness. "All the same, I don’t think you can do anything on a mass level that is effective. If Bono did not hit that song quite right (that is just my opinion; it certainly isn’t his, I imagine), at least he’s trying to do something with serious intent and get deep with his songs.

"Like I said earlier, we just have to accept that there is a lot of unwillingness out there to listen for something, to be surprised. Look at Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA.’ It is a bitter, bitter song, but when he performs it the crowd is pumping their fists, ‘Rah, rah, rah, America!’"

BRUCE IS HAVING TO swallow misinterpretation of a different sort these days. Several love songs and the frequent use of acoustic guitars on Dart to the Heart have led many reviewers to assume that Cockburn now has come full circle. "Everyone is asking me if my love life is all I think about," he says with a chuckle.

"No" is the answer, if you are wondering. "As strange as it sounds," says Bruce, "it makes no difference whether I write a love song or tell a story about being in a refugee camp. For me it comes from the same place. I just want to touch people. It’s a passing of my understanding of reality, trying to put it into a form that is interesting and entertaining to somebody else."

Cockburn fans certainly are touched. For the rest of the year, they will fill clubs around the country to hear his latest spin on reality. He travels with a band on this tour, although you would be hard pressed to find a more stripped-down ensemble.

That is intentional. In 1988, he went out on his first solo tour in nearly 10 years. The warm reception he got brought home to him the truth that his fans are more interested in his songs than they are in how they are produced. "Things were getting bigger and bigger, more stuff was being applied to the songs after the fact," he says in a moment of self-critique. Following that tour, he sought out T Bone Burnett (most recently of Counting Crows fame) to produce his next album. "T Bone knows how to get a sense of a song without piling stuff on top."

Truly, Dart to the Heart is no-frills Cockburn. Yet, at the same time, it is an album he could not have made 20 years ago. Like seasoned redwood it bears the marks of time.

But don’t worry, Cockburn fans, Bruce’s search is not behind him. The album closes with words to live by: "Move fast, stay cool, keep your eye on the front sight." n

DAVID BATSTONE is a professor of religion and culture at the University of San Francisco, and the author, most recently, of New Visions for the Americas (Fortress Press, 1993).