BRUCE COCKBURN'S MUSIC MOVES your feet and your heart, which might be one reason why the 42-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter has attracted an intensely loyal following around the world. Cockburn's career as a superb guitarist and folk singer began simply enough, but it took an unexpected turn when the musician found himself converted to Christianity.
Influenced by writers such as Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Merton, Cockburn was drawn to both a mystical experience of Christ and a growing social awareness of what it meant to love his neighbor. Now, 17 years and 17 albums later, Cockburn's unique blend of faith, politics, and poetry, with rock, jazz, reggae, and Latin rhythms reflects the journey as much as the man.
Cockburn interrupted a European tour last September to perform at Countdown '87, a concert held in Washington, DC, to raise money to oppose further U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan contras. He was interviewed at his hotel by Vicki Kemper.
-- The Editors
Vicki Kemper: How did you get involved with the Countdown '87 concert?
Bruce Cockburn: I was asked to be part of it by Danny Goldberg who runs Gold Castle Records. There was a similar concert on the West Coast, and Joan Baez is doing one in New York also. It was interesting to me because anything that's directed toward stopping the contras is of interest to me.
How did you get interested and involved in the political situation in Nicaragua?
I went to Central America for the first time in 1983 in conjunction with OXFAM/Canada, which was running a series of trips to Central America with people from different sectors in society participating. They had members of Parliament from the various parties, trade union people, and others go to Central America to get a sense of what was going on and report back to whatever sector of the population would listen to them. They wanted people in the entertainment scene to go also, so they invited another Canadian singer named Nancy White and me. We went first to the Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico and then to Nicaragua.
I was interested particularly in Nicaragua before that in a kind of academic way. I was very curious about the revolution as a result of reading the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal, his older stuff especially, and some other things of a less artistic nature. There didn't seem to be anything about the situation that conformed to the stereotype of a revolution in that region as I'd come to understand it.
Of course, going there really crystallized that interest. It became very personal especially as a result of the contact with the refugees, but also the people in Nicaragua. There is such a tremendous spirit among those people and a very real poignancy about that whole scene. Even with all the rhetoric and everything else, they have a quiet sense of commitment to getting on with things, and it was very moving.
Then I wrote the songs, and they produced many discussions and interviews, and so it's gone on. I've been back to Central America twice since then, once to Honduras and a second time to Nicaragua.
Your earliest music wasn't very political. Where and when did your interest in politics begin?
On the surface it was a result of that first trip. But it was something I'd been set up for over a period of years by several factors. One factor was becoming a father [Cockburn has an 11-year-old daughter]. There is something about having this "innocent" new life that makes you look at what kind of world that kid is going to grow up in.
Another factor was the progression of my Christian faith, which started to move away from a very internal, spiritual orientation to some indication that I should learn what it meant to love my neighbor in a deeper way than I had. And that made me more aware of social concerns.
I've always had a certain sensitivity to social issues that has shown up from time to time in the songs. But in the past, it tended to be from the point of view of an observer rather than somebody who is really involved. And it really was these gradual processes culminating in that trip to Central America that moved me toward a more active role.
Do you see your faith and your politics as being strongly connected?
Yes, but not to the point that there is any ideology involved. I think you have to be circumspect in how you connect those things. Love is the important thing, and I'm certainly not an authority on love. But among all the different ways of loving is the need to look at how the system of which I'm a part supports me, in effect, on the backs of people who I'm told aren't my neighbors but who feel like my neighbors. That's the starting point for me in any political involvement. Once I get involved, of course, I'm not necessarily always thinking of how best to love my neighbors, although I think it would be nice if I were.
I think you have to be very careful about trying to define that too much. The Moral Majority is a case in point and the Ayatollah Khomeini is another case in point. History is full of absolutely horrible results of combining religious faith with politics. And it would be sad to see those things repeated very often.
At the same time, for any of us who do share in a faith that has some kind of social awareness, it's a necessity to be involved in some way. I think the important thing to avoid is making any rules about it.
Could you talk about your faith and your conversion to Christianity and the journey you've been on since then?
The conversion itself has been a strange and interesting journey. I can trace it back to when I was in high school, when I first became aware that there was a spiritual side to things, that there was more to life than the tangible.
I didn't grow up in a Christian atmosphere really. I went to church on Sundays, or I went to Sunday School, until I was old enough to resist. But my parents were agnostics so there was no real nurturing of my faith. And gradually, after I did recognize a spiritual reality, it became an ongoing interest to find out more about that.
Christianity at first was a totally unacceptable option. It was too much associated with all the conservative, status quo elements that I grew up with. So I had a brief period of flirting with Buddhism, got fairly involved in various occult schools of thought, and was led through those things to a gradually growing understanding of my faith. Through contact with people and books, I started to steer more and more toward Christianity.
Eventually I reached the point where I was thinking like a Christian and trying to behave like one as far as I understood it without having made the commitment to Christ. I was, in effect, a Christian without having defined myself as such. The last stage of the journey happened through a series of personal difficulties and also encounters with a being that I could only assume was Christ.
The first encounter was probably the most dramatic. It happened during my wedding in late 1969. I got married in a church because my wife wanted to get married in a church. And we went to a particular Anglican church because the priest was a neat guy.
We had a very small ceremony, with just my wife and me and our respective families. As we were exchanging rings, I suddenly became aware that there was another presence that was not visible but was as palpable as if it were visible, standing in front of us at the altar. It wasn't in any way shocking or threatening or even overwhelming, it was just that there was definitely somebody there, and I could only assume it was Jesus because we were in a Christian church.
It was certainly food for thought, and I started getting much more interested after that, much more actively pursuing knowledge and reading the Bible. Eventually I started going to this church and dared to take Communion one day. Once I did that, I thought I had to go see the priest because I had to find what it was I'd done and the implications of it. This priest, who is a particularly wise and generous individual, explained the significance of Communion as he understood it.
These are just two instances that are part of a long chain. Eventually I was brought around to the point where I was more or less forced to say, "Okay, Jesus, I'm yours. Do something with me because I'm not making it on my own." And he did. I felt very involved with Jesus and very directly connected for quite a long time.
And then that marriage broke up after 10 years, and that was cause for considerable questioning because I had always assumed, as we tend to do I guess, that once a thing is done it's done, especially when it's done in front of God like that. And yet I had a sense that God was saying, "Well, you guys, you screwed up just like all the rest of the humans do. Admit it, and let's go on from here. Let's carry on." But it was quite shocking to me that God had permitted this, even though God didn't have very much to do with it directly other than to permit it. It was definitely a human event.
Things changed around that time. I don't know how much of the change to attribute to the breakup of the marriage and how much would have happened anyway. It was partly that tendency to redirect my focus outward and toward other people and not so much toward my own personal connection with God.
Except for a faint sense of presence that comes every now and then, I feel as if I'm on my own. I don't know where it's going now; it's going somewhere definitely. I don't have any feeling that God has abandoned me for any reason, but that for God's own reasons I'm doing whatever I'm doing without that tangible presence at this point.
Obviously in your music you express your political opinions and you also talk -- more mystically perhaps than directly -- about your faith. How are those things tied in with your music? Do you see your music as a vehicle for the message, or is it just art for art's sake and this is who you are as an artist?
It's a little closer to the latter, although I'd be a liar if I said there wasn't some element of deliberation in there, too. But really I write songs because I'm moved to write songs. If there's a vehicle involved, the music tends mostly to be a vehicle for words.
I like writing words especially. What those words say springs from experiences that I have or feelings that I hold strongly. And therefore my opinions on various matters, the things that are closest to the heart, end up in the song. I don't particularly see the songs as a means of manipulating public opinion or of trying to sell anybody on anything. They have that effect sometimes, but that's not why they're written, nor why they're performed.
Some people talk about an artistic responsibility. Do you feel that as an artist with certain gifts you have a responsibility to do some good in the world?
Very definitely. My responsibility as a Christian is to do some good in the world. My responsibility as an artist is to do good art.
But part of doing good art is being aware of the possible effect that you can have on an audience, especially if you're operating in the pop scene. And, therefore, that manifests itself more in the negative sense.
For instance, there are certain kinds of songs that I wouldn't want to write. "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" came awfully close to being one of those. But it would have been dishonest not to have exposed the song to people once it was written. So, it wasn't the question of writing it; it was the question of recording and performing it. I wrestled with that one a bit.
It's a question of appropriateness, really. When I write a song about sex, I look at the different ways of writing about that, and some ways to me are less acceptable. I think it's important to stay away from sleaze, because there's already enough of it around.
I certainly don't edit what I write according to any particular set of rules. It's an attitude that informs my own approach to writing. I think I'm a little less dogmatic about that than I used to be.
"If I Had a Rocket Launcher" is a song that a lot of people really identify with, especially people who have been to the Third World and witnessed the pain and the suffering there and realize that a lot of the pain results from our own lifestyles, and our government. Yet it also raises the question of violence vs. nonviolence. Where are you on that question?
I'm not a pacifist. It would be great if we could avoid violence always, but I know in my heart that under certain conditions I would resort to violence. In fact, the circumstance that produced that song was a good indication of that.
The only reason I wrestled with whether or not I should put that song out in front of people had to do with the fact that I don't think violence is, in the end, a solution to anything. Sometimes it seems inescapable, but it's not good under any circumstances. And I didn't want people to think that I was promoting violence as a solution or trying to convince sympathetic North Americans to go down and start killing Guatemalan soldiers or anything like that. That wasn't the point.
But at the same time, I wrote the song because I was there and I heard those helicopters. I wasn't around when there was violence going on, but it had happened shortly before my arrival and it happened again after I left.
The stories that these people were telling, the terribly desperate situation in which they found themselves, all those things produced this feeling in me, this feeling of outrage against these uniformed individuals in these helicopters. It felt to me that these guys had somehow forfeited their claim to humanity by taking part in this kind of repression. And therefore to shoot down those helicopters wouldn't be the same as killing somebody. Now that's kind of a useless distinction to make, really, because if they'd been people whose faces I could see, I probably still would have felt the same.
But I was troubled by those feelings. I remember when I came back to this little hamlet in the area after two or three days in these refugee camps. I was sitting in my hotel room and crying and downing a lot of Scotch and writing this song. In the end, what caused me to record and perform this song was the fact that the feelings were real and the situation was real. It seemed worth the risk, partly to help expose what was going on in Guatemala and partly to expose to complacent North Americans how inappropriate it is to judge people who get involved in the revolutionary movements in places like Guatemala.
The first people that die in those situations are the peacemakers, and after that the people who are left eventually get so fed up with watching their kids get killed or die of malnutrition that they don't see any other option. It therefore becomes all the more important for us on this side of the situation to exercise what influence we can to change their situation. The violence won't stop until the roots of the situation change.
"Call it Democracy" from World of Wonders is an amazingly comprehensive and politically astute yet poetic description of First World-Third World economic exploitation -- the motives for it and the results of it. Not many people sing about the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Third World debts. Is that an issue that you're really concerned about? Was the writing of it an attempt to give a complete explanation of how the system works?
The reason for writing it was sort of the same as writing anything else -- I'd gotten mad. Every time I have contact with the so-called Third World, I am reminded graphically of what an atrocity the whole system is.
The people that I try to communicate that to most of the time don't understand. You can't understand it unless you've seen what it means for people on the other end of it, who are the donors of our lifestyle. Eventually that produced the song with those kind of feelings.
The IMF was a workable case in point and a workable phrase for a set of sounds for the chorus. But you never know when you start these things how they are going to come out. That song was an attempt to try to say what I've seen and what I felt.
One of the things that interests me about your music -- and it seemed particularly apparent on the World of Wonders album -- is the juxtaposition of the pain and evil in our world with the beauty of creation and the beauty of people. How much does that reflect your worldview?
I don't spend much time thinking about my worldview. But it strikes me that there is something terribly -- and I use that word on purpose -- attractive and romantic about the disintegration and the pain and the evil, too. It's exciting in some ways. And so is the beauty that is relatively free of those things -- the beauty of nature, the beauty that can be found in people, the beauty of people's works.
It's very seldom that you run across anything that is either completely good or completely evil. There's always that sparkle somewhere in the worst of things. There are noble qualities in the worst people and the worst situations. I don't want to sound too grandiose about that because I don't sit around thinking, "Boy, those Honduran soldiers are sure brave." But there are all these ingredients always.
I find the interplay of those things fascinating. Our human attempts at interpreting the relative place of all these elements fall very short of the mark, and in a way that's part of the fascination, too. Nobody's ever been able to figure it out. And I don't expect to be able to figure it out. But something in me always wants to be looking at that.
I'll read a copy of Sojourners or The Other Side and at the same time I'll be reading a copy of Soldier of Fortune or some French comic book with all kinds of weird things in it. All these things are real, and they're all part of the picture. To fall back on Christian rhetoric, everything's there with God's permission.
I think it relates in a way to the far-out end of nuclear physics, where it's been observed that people trying to conduct experiments with subatomic particles influence the action of those particles just by the fact that they're looking at them. That, to me, is what's fascinating about life and that's what shows up in my songs, I guess.
In "Santiago Dawn" and other songs, there is hope in the midst of despair and decay. Where do you see hope, and what are your reasons for hope in the midst of the evil in our world?
The ultimate hope is in God. I have to say that, and I can say it in the context of your magazine because of the nature of the magazine. In another Christian context, it would be hard to say it and have it be understood. Nothing is very clear, but there is hope there.
I have a hope in a transcendent reality that we do sometimes get glimpses of in life. Those glimpses have been frequent enough and clear enough for me to believe firmly that it is there. Sometimes it is hard to hang on to that as a source of hope. But fortunately when I've found it impossible to hang on to that, there's been somebody around to remind me. That transcendent reality is reflected to some extent in people and in the world, whether through beautiful, natural surroundings or through something other people offer. That's fortunate because the opportunities for despair seem much more numerous than the other kinds of opportunities.
Your most current music seems to be pretty eclectic -- a mix of different sorts of styles. What seems to be the most prominent influence these days?
The influences are always easier to detect after the fact. After I've made the next album, I'll be in a better position to answer that. I've liked the trend toward a more basic kind of rock music at this point. I've never really gotten into hard rock, at least not since the acid days anyway. And the bands like Los Lobos and others have been inspirational in a way -- just hearing that raw bar-band sound applied to some degree of sensitivity in the lyrics and a serious intent.
I'm also a big Chrissy Hynde fan, and I listen to a fair amount of jazz. Since I bought a CD [compact disc] player, I've been getting on CD some older albums that I hadn't had for awhile or the ones I thought were really classics. Marianne Faithful's Broken English album, for instance, is really great. The Jennifer Warnes album of Leonard Cohen songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, is a fantastic record. It is so slick in its production, but I have so much respect for the material.
Where do you see yourself going musically? You say you're performing solo these days. Are you working on another album?
I have no intention of doing an acoustic album or a solo album. This is a one-time thing just to give myself a break from the routine of doing a band tour every year.
I've written a few songs toward the next album. It's a bit hard to say what the general shape of the album will be or whether there's a direction indicated there. The songs were all written on acoustic guitar, but whether they'll end up on acoustic guitar or not, I don't really know.
I want to keep the guitar and stick combination that I've had for the past couple of years. I like that sound, and I don't think we've plumbed it to its depths yet. The next touring band will probably be smaller. I think I picture the next album being a little less produced-sounding than World of Wonders. But when you get into the studio, anything can happen.
What things do you think now are the most pressing issues for us? Is AIDS a big concern?
AIDS is such a big concern that I don't even know where to start to think about it. Who knows where it's going to go? And the press is so full of fragmentary information that it's hard to synthesize a point of view about it other than to say it's frightening and the implications are possibly enormous.
The AIDS situation has brought out all these odd attitudes that were always under the surface. Sex is such a basic issue, you really can't get much more basic to human nature than that. All of a sudden there is a horror element thrown into it.
One of the more frightening things about it is not so much the disease as the irrational social response to it. So far there's been a little of that but less than I'd feared.
What other kinds of things are you thinking and reading and writing about these days?
Of the songs that I've written most recently, four songs are active and one is a sort of "possible." The one that's a sort of possible is about all kinds of different ways to die. But it's a sort of amusing song, kind of tongue-in-cheek.
One new song is about going drinking in Katmandu. And one song, called "Gospel of Bondage," is addressed to the Christian Right and its tendency to get sucked in by the doctrine of national security. The other two are love songs. So, it's a little hard to generalize about these things.
Your songs that are mystically about God aren't overtly Christian. What do you think about Christian music, especially those artists who are trying to cross over into the pop mainstream?
I have a problem with the whole concept of a "Christian" music scene. The music it produces, I think, is extremely boring and lacking in creativity. There are exceptions, and I'm encouraged to see that.
I recently attended a major Christian festival in England, the Greenbelt Festival. There were some really interesting things going on there. In Britain they don't have such a defined method of marketing Christian music so they have bands that are operating in the so-called secular sphere who are Christians, singing from a Christian point of view.
Some of that seemed to be rubbing off on the American artists who were there -- Phil Keaggy, for example. I've never quite associated him with the Christian music scene, or at least what I don't like about the Christian music scene, because of his emphasis on instrumental stuff. And he's such a good player. But there was a sense that people were trying to cross over as you mentioned. It's encouraging to see a certain sense of exploration going on with Christian artists asking, "What do we really want to say to people who aren't Christians?"
Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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