You've Never Seen Everything:
the title of Bruce Cockburn's 27th album captures the exploratory spirit
that has animated the music of this versatile singer, songwriter, and
guitarist for more than three decades. Since the beginning, Cockburn
has been a musical traveler. As a kid in Ottawa, Canada, he rocked out
to Elvis records and found his first guitar hero in Scotty Moore. In
the '60s, he got swept up by jazz and enrolled at Berklee College of
Music. After deciding that his musical calling lay elsewhere, Cockburn
dropped out of Berklee to play in rock bands and then hit the Canadian
roads as an acoustic troubadour, blending pastoral and mystical poetry
with state-of-the-art fingerstyle guitar. In the '70s, his songs began
fusing folk and jazz with world music rhythms (notably Jamaican backup
on the hit "Wondering Where the Lions Are"), and he delivered dazzling
guitar instrumentals that were compositionally and technically years
ahead of their time. But in the '80s, anyone pegging Cockburn as a folkie
would have been startled to find him leading a brawny electric rock
band on songs like "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" that bore witness to
the political and social turmoil in Central America.
In the years since, Cockburn
has continued to explore all of these avenues, both as a soloist and
bandleader, while broadening his lyrical outlook with journeys around
the world. West Africa was a fertile source of inspiration for his last
studio album, Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu, which
featured some gorgeous interplay of kora and guitar; and on You've
Never Seen Everything, "Postcards from Cambodia" considers the disturbing
legacies of land mines and the Khmer Rouge. Elsewhere on the new album
Cockburn unveils two fresh collaborations with jazz pianist Andy Milne,
plus several tracks that respond in highly creative ways to the age
of electronica.
In the meantime, Rounder
Records is in the process of reissuing Cockburn's back catalog with
unreleased bonus tracks (often guitar instrumentals), so gems like
Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws and Further Adventures Of are
back in the spotlight again. In a conversation from his home in Montreal,
Cockburn reflected on this expansive new phase in his life and music.
Your new record has a
strong jazz flavor. Who were some of the artists who originally attracted
you to jazz?
Cockburn
Wow—it goes way back, but one of the first jazz guitar heroes I
had was Wes Montgomery. And around the same time, I discovered Gabor
Szabo, a Hungarian refugee in the States who played with Chico Hamilton
in a band with Charles Lloyd, and they did all Charles Lloyd tunes.
The tunes were really good, and in that context Szabo really shone.
He made a few albums under his own name that aren't as interesting.
Did you get inspiration
from nonguitarists also?
Cockburn
As time went on, very much so. [John] Coltrane, Ornette Coleman . .
. Albert Ayler. Ayler made albums that shook the foundations in their
day. He was one of the first exponents of real free jazz. The tunes
were gospel flavored, but they would do these absolutely hairy improvisations
on them that would last hours—amazing stuff in terms of the license
to be completely free.
These are people whose influence
doesn't readily show [in my music]. Coltrane does, in the sense that
he was part of what steered me in a modal direction. But as much as
I loved that music, I was afraid to actually do it. I didn't want to
fuck it up, so I sat on myself and didn't let myself go there. I went
somewhere else instead, and it worked out OK.
Did you learn the language
of jazz, the theoretical side of it?
Cockburn
I studied it. That's what I was doing at Berklee, among other things,
because I thought I wanted to compose jazz music for big bands. I studied
as much theory as they were able to pack into the couple years I was
there, but in the end it wasn't where I wanted to go. I just never related
to ii—V's. The kind of harmonies and harmonic structures I was
learning were interesting, but they weren't absorbing. What drew me
was a kind of harmonic structure that relied less on chord motion and
more on, well, the way Indian music relates to the tonality. In Indian
music, everything is measured according to its distance from the tonic,
and I understood that far better than how to make chords out of scale
tones. I learned that, but it didn't touch my heart the way that other,
more linear music did.
Did you ever feel that
you had to unlearn jazz theory in order to write the songs you wanted
to write?
Cockburn
I never felt like I had to unlearn anything because I never felt like
it made that much of an imposition. I valued what I absorbed from Berklee
mostly for the spirit of music there, partly because of the school and
its courses and partly—maybe more so—because of the company
I was keeping and the fact that everywhere you went, you heard music
all the time. If I walked down the alleys, I'd hear people practicing.
The jazz guys were exploring Eastern music for the first time, and that
captivated me right away. And that was when Hendrix came along. He was
obviously listening to some of that too, so there was an immediate kinship
with what he was doing, and aspiration of course, because I wasn't doing
anything nearly as interesting.
What led to your collaboration
with pianist Andy Milne for the two songs on the new record?
Cockburn My
friend [violinist] Hugh Marsh, who is very much in evidence on this
record and who played with me a lot through the '80s, called up one
day and said, "There's this guy Andy Milne, and he's doing pretty neat
stuff and wants to meet you." Soon after that we went to New York and
Andy came to the gig and introduced himself, gave me a couple of CDs,
and said he was interested in collaborating on some songs. The stuff
he gave me was amazing. I'd been having this big, long dry spell, and
I thought, "This is a gift, a chance to try something I've never done
to a significant degree—collaborate with somebody else as a songwriter—and
this is going to break the dry spell."
We got together, and I had
some lyrics that ended up becoming "Trickle Down," but the first thing
we worked on was "Everywhere Dance," which we just started from scratch.
Andy had a lyric idea, I just started writing stuff, and it immediately
went left from where his idea was going, so there's not really a trace
of his lyric idea left in the song. He put music to it, and that was
it.
So the harmonies on that
came from piano; they don't sound like something a guitarist would come
up with.
Cockburn
No, but it works great on the guitar. This is the wonderful discovery,
because when I first heard it, I thought, "This is a song that I co-wrote
that I'm never going to be able to play!" But in fact those harmonies
fall naturally on the guitar.
It was an interesting experience
working with him. He's a very talented guy, and his band [Dapp Theory]
is so different from anything I've ever worked with. They don't play
anything in 4/4 time—everything is in five or seven or 11. We did
do a version of my song "Let the Bad Air Out," which they kindly did
in four so I could play it. But it was a great learning curve.
His band consisted of the
standard rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums, plus a female vocalist;
a harmonica player, GrŽgoire Maret; and a rapper named Kokayi. Kokayi
improvised parts to "Trickle Down" that don't appear on my record—his
presence didn't really work with my approach to the tune. In the original
version [for Dapp Theory's CD Y'all Just Don't Know], it's half
me singing and half Kokayi rapping.
Grégoire Maret's
harmonica parts are so light and beautiful on this record. They remind
me of Wayne Shorter's playing with Joni Mitchell.
Cockburn
He is a beautiful player. He's got incredible ears. He just listens
and finds the right place to go in with these not necessarily obvious
notes. He sort of is to Toots Thielemans what Wayne Shorter is to Ben
Webster. He's got that command of the harmonica, but he plays in a much
more modern way than bebop style.
Since your guitar playing
stands so well on its own, how do you work with a bass player in a band
context?
Cockburn
In this case, and it's fairly typical, the songs are set up so that
I can play them solo, and guitar parts are what they are. Everybody
has to work around that. So the various bass players were working around
both guitar and some loops that Hugh Marsh added. We recorded pretty
much everything except "Everywhere Dance" with Hugh and me and Gary
Craig playing a kind of human beatbox function. Instead of using metronomic
functions to keep us in time, we played with Gary, whose time is incredibly
good and who has all kinds of feel, so we were able to avoid that kind
of fascist factor that comes into it when you are playing with a strict
rhythm loop. We came out of the original sessions with a trio of us
doing the songs, and we grafted everything else onto that.
What was Gary playing
in those first sessions?
Cockburn
He played various things. [On some songs] it was mostly shaker. He had
a scaled-down kit with a floor tom as a bass drum and some congas as
floor toms, and he used a brass bowl as the top of the hi-hat for some
of the stuff. Just odds and ends, but we went for interesting sounds.
A lot of that stuff ended up in the final mix as well as the regular
drum kit that was added to most of the songs.
What are some examples
of how you used loops?
Cockburn
The two things that immediately come to mind aren't technically loops
but they work like loops. One is the gamelan part in "Postcards from
Cambodia," which is actually four keyboard samples that Hugh played.
He sampled gamelan sounds and then played these four interlocking parts
throughout the piece. The other thing is the frogs of north Zambia [recorded
by a friend of Cockburn's working at a refugee camp] that appear at
various points between songs but are featured in "All Our Dark Tomorrows,"
where the frogs were already in the right key and already played the
right rhythm. Hugh looped those things and then in effect played them
as Gary and I were playing. He would bring them in and out depending
on where he thought they needed to be.
In "You've Never Seen Everything,"
we used what must be the original beatbox ever made. It's an ancient
wooden thing that produces very hokey sounds, and we were actually playing
it in a very slowed down cha-cha rhythm. It's so slowed down that it
gets kind of spacey.
Did you work with loops
while making the record as opposed to during the writing process?
Cockburn
Oh yeah, with the proviso that some of the songs were written with that
in mind—"All Our Dark Tomorrows" being a case in point. I knew
I was going to have loops in that when I was writing it, so I wrote
a guitar part that would work with loops.
The thing that initially
drew me to electronic music, as it's currently practiced, was that it
is made of a bunch of short-term events happening over a drone, which
is mostly what I do on the guitar. And I thought, "This is worth checking
out, because there may be some crossover possibilities." That's the
mentality that went into stuff like "Wait No More" and "Tried and Tested."
I'm thinking, "If I was an electronica guy, what would I do? What sort
of rhythm would I make for this?" And then I tried to get that on guitar.
Which particular artists
in electronica have interested you?
Cockburn
Amon Tobin is one artist I like a lot; a couple of his albums are among
my favorites. There's a guy named Photek, and Talvin Singh. There's
a German industrial band called Einstürzende Neubauten that performs
with a guy playing jackhammer on a steel plate as part of the rhythm
section, so it's quite exciting, but now they've tamed down a bit. I
don't go in for dance electronica that much. I'm more interested in
what they call the chill-out stuff, which is designed for listening
more than dancing, although some of it has got great grooves.
What guitar tunings did
you use on this CD?
Cockburn
"Wait No More" is in a D-minor tuning [D A C G C F]; it's the same tuning
that I used in "Down to the Delta," an instrumental piece [from Breakfast
in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu]. And then there's a fair amount
of dropped D: "Tried and Tested," "You've Never Seen Everything," "Celestial
Horses," "Postcards from Cambodia." "Don't Forget About Delight" is
D A D G A D, which is the first time I have ever used that.
This record features
some great harmony singing.
Cockburn
I'm so happy with the harmonies we got. Sarah Harmer in particular;
she just blew me away. She did the three songs that she's on in a half
hour. She heard the stuff, got it, came up with parts, and sang them
absolutely in tune, no fixes. And with feel—can't be better than
that. Emmylou [Harris] sang beautifully on it. Jackson sang very atypically
on "Celestial Horses"—it's not clearly identifiably Jackson Browne.
Jonell Mosser, who contributed that really sensual vocal to "Wait No
More," she did a wonderful job too. And Sam Phillips . . . there's a
cast of thousands. All great people.
How would you describe
your role in the studio as coproducer?
Cockburn
Well, I mostly am coproducer so I have the power of veto without argument,
which is seldom an issue. So much of the production work is done by
Colin [Linden] and John Whynot, who engineered it and has been part
of the same team for the last three or four albums. I'm feeling increasingly
guilty calling myself a coproducer, except that the conceptions are
mine, pretty much. What we do in the studio is I play the music and
Colin makes sure it gets recorded right, and then we all talk about
what we are going to do next, what gets added to what.
It was actually Colin's
idea, from before we even started, that we might end up using more than
one rhythm section on a given song. It was also his idea to use Larry
Taylor and Stephen Hodges, Tom Waits' rhythm section. They are on "Wait
No More," along with Gary, "Celestial Horses," and "You've Never Seen
Everything."
What was it like to dig
back into the archives and listen to unreleased material for the reissue
of your old CDs?
Cockburn
I was dreading it initially, thinking, "Oh geez, I'm going to have to
suffer through all this stuff that I regret." But I didn't end up regretting
very much of it at all and had a lot of fun, especially with the stuff
we got to add. "Coldest Night of the Year," for instance, always should
have been on Inner City Front, so it was wonderful to have the
chance to put it back in context.
Generally, why did the outtakes
not make the original albums?
Cockburn
Mostly because in the days of vinyl, you could only put 18 minutes on
a side before you started losing sound quality. Sometimes you could
get away with a few more, but with anything over 20 minutes you were
paying a price in terms of level and sound quality. In the Falling
Dark, for instance, had all those extra songs that weren't quite
enough to make it a double album, but there was way more than would
fit on a single vinyl record. A couple of them were included on compilations
that came along later, but they sat pretty much until they could all
be included on a CD.
There are some nice bonus
guitar instrumentals on these reissues, like "Mountain Call" [Further
Adventures Of], "Cala Luna" [The Trouble with Normal], and
"Bye Bye Idi" [Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws]. Are there tunes
here that you had forgotten about?
Cockburn
Yeah. Not "Cala Luna," but the other two I had completely forgotten
about. Once we get past the '70s, there were fewer guitar-for-the-sake-of-guitar
things because I was playing in a band context and the whole orientation
was different.
Musicians often say that
touring makes it hard to write songs, but for you the opposite seems
to be true: so many of your songs relate to specific places. Do you
find that there is a close relationship between seeing new things and
writing new songs?
Cockburn
Yes, I do find that, but touring doesn't fit into that equation really.
You don't often see new things—you just see dressing rooms and
hotel rooms and stages and the inside of the bus. It's not conducive
to the experiences that produce songs for me, although once in a while
I do get songs in the course of a tour. But stuff like the trip to Vietnam
and Cambodia [sponsored by the Campaign for a Landmine Free World] that
produced "Postcards from Cambodia" is a different kind of travel altogether.
That kind has been inspirational on many occasions for me.
Do you discover local
music during those trips?
Cockburn
The Southeast Asia trip had some really interesting encounters—like
I ended up jamming with a fiddle player and a percussionist in northern
Cambodia at an impromptu party. Their fiddle is like an erhu, the Chinese
vertical violin, but the playing was like mountain fiddle tunes from
that region. It was exciting music and somewhat challenging to find
a way to fit a guitar into it.
But a lot of the time, [the
songwriting inspiration] is more about the lyrics. I spent the latter
part of the '60s and early part of the '70s listening to every conceivable
kind of so-called ethnic music I could get my hands on, so I'd kind
of heard it all before I started traveling. There are always surprises—I
hadn't heard Tuvan throat singing, for instance, so when I discovered
that about ten years ago that was a big exciting thing. But I had listened
to a lot of African music, Asian music (South Asian music particularly),
and Latin American music too, so going to Central America didn't show
me anything I hadn't heard before. It was neat to hear people playing
the music, but it wasn't a discovery exactly.
Often your most directly
political songs are inspired by your travels.
Cockburn That has
been the case. But the songs that people refer to as political songs
are as much observations of human existence as anything else. They are
not so much about political things as about what underlies what we have
to deal with on a political level, which is greed. The degradation of
the environment, the miserable state of human rights in the world, all
these things are directly attributable to greed. In some ways, the political
solutions to the problems are only Band-Aids, and they will probably
never be anything better than that as long as greed is allowed to run
rampant.
Do you find it frustrating
how people apply the political label to songs and then put them off
in a box?
Cockburn
They do, and if they are rock 'n' rollers, they do the same thing with
an acoustic guitar, and if they are acoustic folkies they do the same
thing with an electric guitar. It is frustrating to run across any instance
of people trying to put things in a box. But it's a fact of life, so
I guess you just have to make so much noise that they can't ignore it.
I don't know how this
feels from the vantage point of Montreal, but in the U.S. right now
there's so little tolerance for protest of any sort, and some artists
are being punished commercially for raising their voices. How does that
environment affect you?
Cockburn
[Laughs] It makes me wonder what's going to happen when I try
to cross the border next! That's the biggest thing. . . . The job of
an artist, whether you are a songwriter or painter or photographer or
an actor, is to try to tell what you think is true. And people are free
to disagree, they are free to ignore you, and they are free to respond
with their own ideas. That's how it's supposed to work. That doesn't
change just because the political climate heats up a bit—it's just
that everything becomes a little edgier.
So hopefully there are people
who will be willing to hear my point of view as expressed in the songs,
and if there are not, well, it's everybody's misfortune [chuckles].
But so far my audiences have been tolerant of the things I have to say.
I keep seeing people do a certain amount of stretching. When I first
started calling myself a Christian, there were a lot of Jewish people
listening to my music who were very uncomfortable with that. Some of
them stopped listening, but a lot of them stayed with it because they
were willing and able to look past what might seem to them like an unwelcome
ideology.
I like to think that there
are always going to be people who want to hear somebody trying to tell
what's true, even if they don't agree with the specifics of it. The
idea that you are trying to get at the truth is what's important. There
will always be some support for that.
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, September
2003, No. 129.
