Music Show

Canadian singer-songerwriter, whose musical research for his songs has taken him to warzones like Cambodia and Iraq.

Transcript

Andrew Ford: Well that was Trickle Down, and it comes from the new CD, You've Never Seen Everything, by Bruce Cockburn. Obviously anybody who thinks of Bruce Cockburn as a folk singer is behind the times: living in the 1970s I would say. It's a great pleasure to welcome back to The Music Show, Bruce Cockburn.

Thank you very much, nice to be here.

Andrew Ford: This new album, which I've been listening to with great pleasure, has evidence of, oh I don't know, you've seem to have been listening to dance music, and rap, and a lot more jazz, and there's an increasingly refined producer's ear there. Do you regard your music as an evolution, or is it more like an accumulation?

Or is there a difference? I guess the answer is both, and I think I've always been interested in a lot of different kinds of music, and jazz in particular has been a love of mine since I was in high school. When I went to music school after high school, before I realised I was going to end up writing songs, I thought I was going to be composing jazz and I went to study that in music school.

Andrew Ford: This is Berkeley, in Boston?

Yes, that's correct. And so it's always been there, but for the longest time I didn't feel competent to play it and I never really developed the charts necessary to play that music, or the theoretical understanding for that matter either. But over time I've gotten better at that end of things, and little by little the jazz has kind of come back in. Except for a brief period in the early '90s where I made an effort to not include jazz; I purposely made a couple of rootsier albums, Nothing But a Brain being the most representative of that line of thinking, but just because I realised one day I had always - but there were not very many of the songs that I'd written that somebody who wasn't a skilled musician could just sit down and have fun with and still be able to make it sound good. So I deliberately tried to write a body of songs that would be more available to people in that way, and occasionally in those two albums, Nothing But a Burning Light and Dart to the Heart. But after that I thought OK, well I've done that, so the jazz started to come flying back in, and over the last three albums it's continued to be present.

Andrew Ford: It's harmonically very rich, and there are some beautiful unpredictable chords. Do these come with the melodic lines, and the lyrics, or do they evolve too?

Bruce Cockburn: Well the song, Trickle Down for instance, is my version of a song that I wrote with Andy Milne. It's not typical of what I've done generally, because I've co-written with other artists very rarely, and when I have it's been my words and my music with help from somebody else. In this case, Andy Milne who's a very gifted jazz pianist, a young guy based in New York, approached me about collaborating with him on a couple of songs for an album that he wanted to do, and I'd been experiencing a bit of a dry spell at the time, so I thought this was a good opportunity to kind of kick myself out of that, so I said Yes. And so what you're hearing, a lot of really interesting harmonic moves in Trickle Down and in the other song that we wrote together called Everywhere Dance, it's Andy's compositional gift you're hearing there. But it was a fun learning curve for me to kind of work around that stuff and because we did write in a very back and forth kind of way. I'd come up with a lyric idea, he'd come up with some music, and he'd come back to me with the need for more syllables in this particular line, or fewer in this one, and so on. So it's was a more deliberate process than I usually apply to songwriting, but a very interesting one, and I 'm pretty proud of the songs we got.

Andrew Ford: Yes. Well perhaps we could talk about the words. For example, since you've just described the manner of writing Trickle Down, do you think of words and music as separate things?

Ideally in a perfect song, they would have equal weight, but they're separate. I personally start with the lyrics. It requires something close to a finished set of lyrics before I'll get around to find suitable music for carrying those lyrics, and what I've compared it to in the past, the music part of the process is to scoring a film, where you have characters, and images and ideas and sometimes actions that need to be supported by the music but not interfered with by it. So for me, I keep a notebook, I write down the word ideas as they come to me, and sometimes an idea will come and become a song almost immediately. There's a song called Open on the new album that would fit that description. Other times, it takes a long time to kind of translate an idea into something communicable through song, like Postcards from Cambodia, for instance, which is on the album also, made out of my notes from Cambodia, with a sung chorus. It took the longest time to figure out how to put those notes together into a form that worked musically. So I never really know until I'm into the process, how it's going to be.

Andrew Ford: Let's talk about the research element, because you mentioned the notes you took in Cambodia; you've been to Mozambique and found out at first hand about land mines; you've been in Iraq this year. Why did you go to Iraq?

Bruce Cockburn: I went to see for myself what was going on essentially. What interested me particularly was how the people of Baghdad are dealing with the situation they're in, and what it means to be living with that stuff. And we see the broad strokes on TV. We see bombs and military movements and the pronouncements of politicians, but very little coverage of what life is like for people living with that stuff. I had hoped to, and I think I did, actually get a pretty good look at it. I mean in seven days you don't become an expert on a place, but I do think that we had a very wide-ranging bunch of meetings with different kinds of people, people from different walks of life in Baghdad, and got a pretty good sense of the overall feeling that can be found there.

Andrew Ford: You said you went there to see for yourself, as though it was the most normal thing in the world that any songwriter would do the same, but in fact most songwriters wouldn't do that, they wouldn't make these research trips that you have made. It suggests that, although I said at the beginning Bruce Cockburn is not a folk singer, but perhaps you have a folk singer's concerns.

Bruce Cockburn: I don't know what I am. My job is to write about what it is to be human in the world and what it is to be human covers a lot of territory and allowance for a lot of different kind of subject matter to turn up in songs. So sometimes the subject matter revolves around the issues of the day, other times the issues of the day become a kind of staging area for speculations of a broader sort into the human condition, as was the case of Postcards From Cambodia, or as might well be the case with a song, if I get one, from the Baghdad trip.

Andrew Ford: You say if you get one, and I guess sometimes you go into a situation, a political situation perhaps, where you are expected and feel you have to react quickly, but that's not necessarily always the best approach with art, is it? Sometimes you should sit back and absorb the experience, and I think that's - is that what you're hinting at, when you say if you get a song from Iraq?

Bruce Cockburn: Well I would like it to be that grand, and that is a nice statement of how things are to be I think, but for me it comes down to luck, a lot. I took a lot of notes in Baghdad, but I've no guarantee that I'll be able to make those into a workable song, and I haven't had time to really sit and live with my experiences there and reflect on them since then, because I've been on tour the whole time. So the impressions are very fresh still, and my notebook is full of jottings, but whether I'll be able to make it into a song is still up in the air. I hope so, because I would like to, just for my own sake, and because of course a song affords an opportunity to keep on talking about these kinds of things when they're not in the news any more.

Andrew Ford: Well, like Cambodia for instance. You obviously are not impressed by the efficacy of Trickle Down economics, as we've heard, but in a sense what you're talking about, putting out these songs, keeping talking about things, are you after some kind of trickle down effect yourself?

Bruce Cockburn: Interesting. Not sure how it's supposed to work. I think it's quite different actually, because I think that a song touches a person, a song doesn't touch a society, it doesn't touch a condition of life, it doesn't touch a demographic, it touches a person. Songs can be measured according to all these other things but when I react to a song I hear, I'm reacting to something that's touched me and I'm perceiving it through the filter of my own experience etc., and responding accordingly. And it's very much a one-on-one experience.

Andrew Ford: Yes but then you tell someone about it, don't you? And that's trickle down.

Bruce Cockburn: Well OK, yes, fair enough, and if you don't get a lot of airplay then you depend on that sort of things for people to find out that you exist. But yes, we like to call that 'word of mouth', rather than trickle down.

Andrew Ford: Give us a word of mouth about Everywhere Dance.

Bruce Cockburn: Everywhere Dance was, as I mentioned earlier, it's the other song that Andy Milne and I wrote together. It's a very different kind of song. It started with an idea that he had, I can't quite remember the nature of that idea, but it moved very quickly into a different realm. Something he said reminded me of that picture of an afternoon moon that looks so translucent in the sky, and the song kind of built up from that image. But it really expresses something that I've felt for a long time, an aspect of my attempts to understand what it is to be a spiritual being in this cosmos, and how much everything's about motion, from molecular motion to wave motion, to whatever, I mean we are bundles of electromagnetic waves and we think we have substance, but really we're just motion. And everything that exists that we can see that looks so solid is just more and different manifestations of motion, so that's what the song tries to get at.

Andrew Ford: Well we should listen to it. Bruce Cockburn, it's been a great pleasure talking to you, and I hope you enjoy your time in Australia.
couple of weeks ago.