<\/p>\n
There\u2019s roads and there\u2019s roads<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n
And they call, can\u2019t you hear it?<\/p>\n
Roads of the earth<\/p>\n
And roads of the spirit<\/p>\n
The best roads of all<\/p>\n
Are the ones that aren\u2019t certain<\/p>\n
One of those is where you\u2019ll find me<\/p>\n
Till they drop the big curtain<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn<\/a> recorded those lyrics in \u201cChild of the Wind\u201d on Christmas Eve 1989.<\/p>\n
With the release of his 31st<\/sup> album in 40 years, \u201cSmall Source of Comfort<\/a>,\u201d it is obvious that this \u201cchild of the wind\u201d continues to travel\u00a0 uncertain roads, as compelled as ever by the adventures that await him.<\/p>\n
\u201cSmall Source of Comfort\u201d is Cockburn\u2019s first new studio album since 2006\u2019s \u201cLife Short Call Now<\/a>,\u201d and takes listeners another vivid journey \u2014 a sonic road trip.\u00a0Cockburn lives in Ontario but his longtime girlfriend, MJ, moved from Brooklyn, NY<\/a> to San Francisco a few years back and her suitor-troubadour spends a lot of time crisscrossing North America to spend time with her.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s road travel that dominates the imagery on the album\u201d Cockburn said by phone from his home in Kingston last week. The road trips gave him a lot of time alone, \u201cwhich was one of the attractions,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t do that very much these days so the road is the way to get that solitary space.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cockburn passes the time on his Canada-to-California trips talking on the phone, listening to music or simply watching the highway roll out before him and the landscape ebb and flow, transforming great plains into mountains and rivers into sea.<\/p>\n
The stunningly beautiful song, \u201cRadiance,\u201d says, in part, \u201cShe strides across the blacktop\/Low-sun lit, golden\/Radiance is a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cockburn, 65, got the idea from an article mentioning \u201cthe Divine Feminine representing the radiance which pervades the cosmos. I liked the image. Then, driving down the road at sunset, I saw the first verse unfold,\u201d he says in the album\u2019s liner notes.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n
A collaboration with fiddler Jenny Scheiman, started by working on a demo together for a proposed film soundtrack that got derailed when the director went in a different musical direction. While their soundtrack never materialized, the partnership between Cockburn and Scheiman inspired several new songs on \u201cSmall Source of Comfort,\u201d including the instrumentals \u201cBohemian Three Step\u201d and \u201cLois on the Autobaun,\u201d another road-travel-inspired song named for Cockburn\u2019s mother, who passed away last August. (An interesting aside: In 1970, the year his first album was released, Cockburn composed two songs for the soundtrack of the film \u201cGoin\u2019 Down the Road\u201d the story of two young men who drive their Chevy Impala from the Canadian Maritimes<\/a> to Toronto and is widely considered to be one of the most influential Canadian films of all time.)<\/p>\n
Cockburn also composed two new songs with Annabelle Chvostek<\/a> (formerly of the Wailin\u2019 Jennys) \u2014 \u201cDriving Away\u201d and \u201cBoundless.\u201d The latter describes a journey of a more eternal variety.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n
The howling wind it sings to me<\/em><\/p>\n
The sky looks troubled but I feel free<\/em><\/p>\n
Visions and feeling and ink on my hands<\/em><\/p>\n
You can travel forever and never land<\/em><\/p>\n
A few years ago, when I asked him who he thought God was, Cockburn, a Christian with a serious aversion to dogmatism, said he liked the \u201cKabalistic view of God as \u2018the boundless,\u2019 \u2026 that there\u2019s no image that applies at all and there\u2019s no limits and every image that you could possibly think of is going to have limitations.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Cockburn isn\u2019t touring the world<\/a> as a musician, you can often find him traveling the globe as a \u201cseeker.\u201d In the last three years, his wanderlust has taken him to Argentina (where he attempted to learn Spanish and the tango, with mixed results), Israel, Nepal and Afghanistan, where in 2009 he visited his younger brother, Capt. John Cockburn<\/a>, a physician in the Canadian Army<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Cockburn, a longtime social-justice activist whose political leanings often tilt to the left, has serious misgivings about the war in Afghanistan. So when his brother decided to join the military about three years ago,\u00a0 after a long career as a civilian doctor, it gave rise to more some interesting conversations, and a journey to the Middle East to see the war up close and personal.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to respect the opinion of people who spend so much time that close to something,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know where this all shakes down to in terms of should we or shouldn\u2019t we be there \u2026the cons probably out weight the pros, but the pros are very real too. You probably don\u2019t want a country that is run by a bunch of assholes that go around throwing acid in women\u2019s faces because they want to learn to read. Fuck you. Fuck those people. They don\u2019t have the right to walk around like that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, do we need to send an army to deal with it? I don\u2019t know about that, but that\u2019s what they\u2019re dealing with. And it\u2019s like a boil in the world, that kind of thinking, that fundamentalist attitude that says our way is the only way and anyone who doesn\u2019t go our way is going to get hurt. And it\u2019s the same when it\u2019s got a Christian face, when it\u2019s got a Muslim face, or when its\u2019 got a Marxist face, for that matter. Believers of that kind are in serious error and part of their serious error it to think that they have the right to get the rest of us to think like they do and act like they do. And they don\u2019t. So how much of that can you put up with in the world?\u201d<\/p>\n
On his journey from Ottawa to Kandahar Airfield<\/a> in Afghanistan where he played for the troops and, upon performing his famous song \u201cIf I Had a Rocket Launcher<\/a>\u201d was briefly handed an actual<\/em> launcher, Cockburn who was traveling with the governor general of Canada, stopped over at Camp Mirage<\/a>, a military staging area near Dubai. There he witnessed the caskets of two Canadian Forces members who had been killed earlier in the day being lowered from a plane on their way back home.<\/p>\n
That experience, which touched Cockburn so deeply he has a hard time articulating it in conversation, was the inspiration for \u201cEach One Lost,\u201d perhaps the most powerful song on the new album.<\/p>\n
In it, Cockburn sings, \u201cWe want the rule of love enough to fight and die to keep it coming\/if that sounds like confusion brother think again\/we know exactly what we chose\/Each one lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
The final track on \u201cSmall Source of Comfort\u201d is the song \u201cGifts,\u201d originally composed in the late 1960s. Cockburn refused to record it for his first album, joking at the time that he\u2019d record it for his last instead.<\/p>\n
The appearance of the song on his latest album begs the question: Is there something\u00a0 you\u2019re not telling us, Bruce?<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no,\u201d he laughed. \u201cAt this point, it seemed like if I\u2019m really going to put it on the last album that I really ought to start thinking about that. \u2018Cause you never know now. I may be\u2026it\u2019s not necessary to imagine my demise but it could be that. It could be that the hands give out or the brain gives out or something happens \u2013 or that the creativity gives out. Any of these things can happen and sometimes do to people, so it seemed like this was time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSmall Source of Comfort\u201d doesn\u2019t have a whiff of finality to it, at least not to my ears. I certainly didn\u2019t hear a final curtain call.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll try to remember that if the time comes,\u201d he said, still chuckling. \u201c\u2018No, Cathleen doesn\u2019t think it is. You\u2019ve got it all wrong. It\u2019s not supposed to be the last album.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Cockburn is heading out on that uncertain road once again when he launches a tour of\u00a0 North America<\/a> on March 24 in Kelowna, British Columbia.<\/p>\n
His extraordinary\u00a0 journey \u2014 musical, spiritual and otherwise \u2014 continues. I, for one, am just happy to be along for the ride.<\/p>\n