In the many years since his first album in 1970, Bruce Cockburn has been identified by music listeners in many ways; as a singer, a songwriter, a nimble guitarist, a poet, a mystic, an activist. But when all is said and done, he is a visionary artist who mirrors the human experience in ways most of us can relate to easily. Maybe that's why he called one of his earlier albums "Humans."

During the next hour, we will have a conversation with Cockburn and try to get to know this human named Bruce Cockburn better - and we'll get to know his new album "You've Never Seen Everything" better as well.
I'm Jody Denberg.

Bruce Cockburn at KGSR's 4th Anniversary Party - 12/2/94

Q: Bruce, I know you often take your bicycle out on tour for exercise. Have you broken out the bike here in New York City yet?

A: I haven't on this visit to New York. In the past I have, though, yeah. It's actually quite a lot of fun riding in Manhattan. Stimulating.

Q: I know you spent decades living in the northeast, in Toronto. And didn't you move even further northeast to Montreal a few years ago?

A: Yeah. A couple of years ago, actually, I moved to Montreal. And that's been home base now for that long.

Q: Why did you move?

A: I woke up one morning and I realized I'd been living in Toronto -- or in that area at least for 20 years. And it seemed like that was long enough. So it was time to move. And I picked Montreal for a couple of different reasons. In eastern Canada, short of going all the way to the Atlantic, it's the other happening cultural center besides Toronto. And my daughter was living there at the time and I was going out with a woman who lived in Vermont at the time, also. So it was much closer for us to sort of get together than driving all the way from Toronto or to Toronto. So for all those reasons, I ended up in Montreal. And I had this -- a brilliant scheme where I was going to enroll in a French course and become fluent at that, because Montreal is predominantly a francophone city. But I haven't been there for longer than two weeks at a stretch since I moved there. So that was the end of the course idea.

Q: I want to hold true to the title of "You've Never Seen Everything" by talking about something those listening to us can't see. That's the new CD's cover. What was your vision for it? Your head appears to be surrounded by sparks or something?

A: Well, it's really the artist's vision, Michael Wrycraft, who put the cover artwork together. He took a photograph that was from a session that we did in anticipation of having stuff for the album cover, and messed with it in that particular way. It always reminds me of a coin, that particular picture. I feel like it should be mounted on a coin or a postage stamp or something. But I liked the idea of the sparks. So, you know -- but what Michael was thinking of when he did that, I have no idea.

Q: You took a break from the road in 2001. And in that year, you were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, and you recorded "You've Never Seen Everything" at the end of last year. I've read you say that you never assume you're going to be able to write another album after you finish one and that you're afraid of repeating yourself. During your break, were you daunted at the task of writing this new album?

A: Well, I took the break because I hadn't been writing. And the previous time when I experienced a long dry spell, a sort of sabbatical was the answer to that. I didn't let it go quite as long this time. But after a few months of not writing anything -- I had a lot of ideas in my notebook, but nothing that I could make gel into a song. I decided it was clearly time for a break again. So I took my ten-year holiday that -- that seems to be the pattern. Every ten years I seem to take a break. But it wasn't daunting, once I knew that my time was my own. Although, it didn't come out the way I wanted it to. I had envisioned a year where I would just wake up in the morning and go, "I wonder what I'll do today." And just to get rid of all the kind of stresses and strains of normal life, plus the road and all the other things that I do. But it turned out to be full of crises of various sorts. So it didn't have -- didn't work that way at all. But what it did do is produce all these songs. So it served its purpose in any case.

Q: God laughs when we make plans.

A: Yeah, I know.

Q It's the truth.

A: Sometimes we can get lucky and you can actually hear that laughter.

Q Listen for the laugh.

A: Yeah.

Q: Your co-producer for this project, as well as the two studio albums that came before - Colin Linden. Did the two of you brainstorm how to make this record sound differently than your other 26 albums?

A: Less about how to make it sound differently than just about what to do with the songs and what general approach to take with the album. Colin may have been thinking about differences, but for me, I approach each album as its own entity. And the songs themselves dictate what kind of music is going to be with them. And from that, what sort of treatment that music will get in the studio.

Q: The song we're going to open with, Open, in that song you say, "I never lived with balance, I always wake up nervous." And you are always accomplishing so many things inside the musical realm, outside. It's hard for me to believe. Do you perceive yourself as being an unbalanced and nervous person?

A: I always wake up nervous is a slight exaggeration, although there have been many days when I have done. But it's just -- it sort of comes down to where you get your ideas from. And a lot of the things -- there was an old song of mine -- this is an indirect answer, but I will get there. There was an old song of mine called The Rose Above the Sky. And that image struck me at one point as being a particularly useful and beautiful image. This is going back years now. But I got the idea from looking at myself in the mirror and I was wearing a blue T-shirt and this sort of rose-colored bandana. And, you know, (this) utterly mundane and ridiculous kind of setting that caused this sort of idea to click. You know, this body was built on a Friday. And I'm not balanced. I'm lopsided and whatever. So for me to say I never live with balance is a mundane, physical truth that is of no interest to anyone but me. But it goes -- obviously, it has implications beyond the physical. And, of course, when somebody else hears it, they interpret it in terms of their own life and whether or not that's balanced. And that's really -- that's when the song kind of works is when it touches somebody else.

SONG: OPEN

Q Bruce, fellow Canadian Sarah Harmer adds a sweet harmony to that song, as well as a couple of others on the disc. Emmylou Harris, Sam Phillips also sing on this album. And in the recent past, you've had Lucinda Williams, Margo Timmons, Jonathan Brooke and Patty Griffin singing along. Good choices.

A: I think so!

Q: Do you hear a woman's accompaniment in your mind when you're composing?

A: Not so much, although with the title song on this album, "You've Never Seen Everything", when I wrote that chorus, I really heard Emmylou's voice in it and I was really very pleased that she was willing and able to participate. Normally, it's an after-the-fact thing. You know, the song exists and then so who's going to sound good in this. And I like the sound of women's voices with mine and in my songs. And we've sort of developed what seems to have become a pattern over the last few albums of inviting really interesting female singer/songwriters to get involved in these things. Ani DiFranco's on one as well. They're all people I admire as artists greatly. And in most cases are people I've worked with in one way or another, outside the studio. So at least we're acquainted before they get invited to come and sing. But lucky for me, I've been able to get all these great women to be on the albums.

Q: And we should mention that Jackson Browne does a great job on Celestial Horses on the new album as well.

A: He does. He sings beautifully on that. And it's so surprising. His vocal approach is so surprising. It's atypical for Jackson, I think, and very, very sweetly done.

Q: We're talking about composing. You always note on your album covers the year and the city you write a particular song. What started that tradition for you?

A: Poets that I read and admired in school, you know. Allen Ginsberg's always done that, for instance, although I can't say I read him in school. They were a little safer about school when I was there. But a lot of poets I admire just sort of did that. And I adopted that as a kind of habit under that influence. But once in a while, it makes a difference. A lot of the time, it doesn't, particularly certain songs. Open, I think, probably could have been written in any city on any kind of an early morning. But other songs - Postcards from Cambodia, for instance, on the album, I think it's helpful for people to know that the content of that song came from Cambodia. That it's not something I made up. Same with a lot of the other songs that are travel related on other albums.

Q: And on this album, when I first heard Celestial Horses, I thought this is a Bruce Cockburn song that could have been concurrent with All the Diamonds in this World or something. And then I come to read that that song had its genesis 25 years ago or so.

A: It did, yeah, back in -- somewhere around '78. I was traveling back from Vancouver to the east. I had done some gigs on the west coast and I was making my way home in my camper. And I had some time, so I just -- I was by myself and I decided just to hang in the interior of BC for a bit and see what that looked like, because I had never done more than kind of travel through from one side to the other.

And I was staying in people's front yards and that sort of thing. And the local folks in this area showed me where there was a hot spring that hadn't been commercialized. It was just sulphurous. It came bubbling out of a mountainside a few hundred yards up from the two-lane highway that went through there. And the locals had dammed the stream that resulted from this and made a pool that you could sit in up to your neck.

And the night I left the area, I went up there and sat in this stinky, steamy water and looked at this most beautiful scene. There was a full moon on the other side of the valley, along that narrow north-south valleys with deep lakes in them. So I'm looking across this lake at this full moon. And I started imagining horses coming down the rays of the moon. And the verses of the song, more or less as you hear them in the album, flowed from that experience.

But I could never quite make them make sense as a song. So, you know, I tried it for a while and I wrote something that was a song with those verses. And then didn't like it, so I just put it away for a while. And I came back to it a few years later. Didn't come up with anything. It would sort of come back to me every few years. And then all of a sudden, last year, it came back and it worked. So there it is. You never know.

Q: I always wonder about your motivation for writing lyrics, whether you have this burning need to express yourself, or if you're trying to inform or even influence the thinking of listeners.

A: It's mostly, for me, about sharing experience. When we play live and people are all in a room together and the music is the excuse, the music is also the medium for the sharing of human expression that, I think is one of the things that we can really do with each other. One of the things that humans are good at doing is sharing expression. And it's important to me to kind of be part of that. I don't know why that's so.

I mean, you know, it just seems to go hand-in-hand with writing songs. And over the years, I've come to understand that fact about the writing of songs. I think when I started out, I didn't have any idea. I just wanted to write songs and didn't think about it beyond that. But over time, you start thinking about what it actually means to do what you do. I write what is as close to truth as I can get about whatever it is that stimulated me enough to want to write it down and hope that that -- the expression of that, my truth, will touch somebody else in some way that helps either reveal their truth to them or that at least strikes a chord that allows them to go, "yeah, okay, I'm not alone." And that's kind of the value, perhaps, of that sharing of experiences, to know that we're not alone.

Q: What was the first quote that you had that you read off of your guitar last night at your concert at the Bottom Line about art?

A: Oh, yeah, I won't try and say it in French. It's a French quote. But it's from a comic book artist who's one of my favorite. I have a modest collection of comics that I've put together over many years. And the quote says something, more or less like, art is a weapon against spiritual blindness.

Q: Amen.

A: Yeah.

Q Do you feel like you're on a mission sometimes? And I'm not even getting into your activist work and the political realm. But as a musician, do you feel like you're on a mission to express these truths?

A: I feel an organic urge to express these truths. So it's not quite the same as being on a mission. It's more like having to go to the bathroom. It -- you know, it's kind of just it's there. It has to be done. You can't get away from it. And if I get away from it for too long, I start feeling very uncomfortable.