More than three decades into his musical career, Bruce Cockburn has reaffirmed his relevance with Life Short Call Now

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Bruce Cockburn
Penbrooke Meadows Park
Thursday, August 9 - Thursday, August 9

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You know how it is. People come into your life, become seemingly indispensable and than drift away. Then, when you do reconnect with them, you instantly remember why they were so important to you in the first place. Musical friends can be like that, too. They entertain us, empathize with our pain, articulate our hopes and fears and give us precious insight into the world around us. Then, sometimes, we lose touch. In the ’80s, Bruce Cockburn’s relevance and importance were unquestioned. Albums like Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaw, Humans and Stealing the Fire became part of Canada’s collective conscience, but in the ’90s, his profile diminished somewhat. He didn’t go anywhere, but some of us fans may have wandered off.
    Last year, Cockburn reaffirmed his continuing legacy with a quiet urgency on Life Short Call Now. Today, at exactly the pre-arranged time, the phone rings and Cockburn is on the other end. He’s calling from London, England where he’s in the midst of a solo world tour. Although I’d consider him a close “musical friend,” we’ve never actually met, and it occurs to me that it must be a little weird when complete strangers feel like they share a personal connection with you.
    “It is a little weird, but you get used to it,” he allows. “I mean, I put the stuff out there, and I want people to hear it, and then when they do, I don’t really have a right to complain about the fact that they react to it. If people have actually paid enough attention to it for them to feel that certain comfort factor — it’s an illusion, too, of course, they don’t know me, and I don’t know them — but we do have that link, through the music. So it’s legitimate, to that extent.”
    Life’s Short finds Cockburn exploring new territory and trying a few new tricks. A 23-piece orchestra is featured on four tracks. On one, “Beautiful Creatures,” Cockburn’s voice soars to previously unheard falsetto heights without a rhythm section. “It’s from listening to Radiohead or one of those English fellows who do that sort of thing,” he says.
    Politics and current events inform “This is Baghdad” and “Tell the Universe,” and are beautifully balanced out by the spiritual and personal leanings of “Mystery” and “To Fit in My Heart.” In the latter he sings, “God’s too big to fit in a book, but nothing’s too big to fit in my heart.” The closing instrumental, “Nude Descending A Staircase” is a jazzy, descending chromatic figure with beat box and short-wave samples that sounds absolutely unlike anything he’s done to date. Cockburn suggests that this might be an indication of things to come.
    “I don’t know this for sure,” he says, “but I kind of hope it’s a bit of a harbinger, because there’s places I’d like to go that I’ve never gone. Over time, having explored a lot of the territory that is more familiar, I’d like to sort of take a crack at some other things.”
    As you would expect, Cockburn has plenty to say about politics and the state of the world. A frequent traveler, he’s fully aware of the insularity and complacency many Canadians feel.
    “In Canada, we’re a little behind in the healthy debate departement, in general,” he says “I think we’ve been spared a lot of stuff by default because we have powerful friends, and so far, our enemies have, at least since the end of the Second World War, been less aggressive with us than they have with other people. In a way, we have the luxury of being able to kind of sit back and judge these things.”
    As a Christian who’s said publicly that he believes love is the center of all things, does he feel hopeful about positive change over the next decade or so? Not exactly. “I think we’re in for a lot of trouble,” he says with a nervous laugh. “I don’t feel that hopeful about it, although I also don’t think that it’s appropriate to give up hope. I think that we have to always be alert to the possibilities that might show up. Because those possibilities are probably going to be tiny and hard to see, but they’re going to be there, and that’s where, if what I have is called hope, that’s where it lies.”
    Whatever changes lie ahead, we can count on Cockburn to articulate and illuminate them. “I don’t plan ahead with what I’m going to write,” he says. “I get an idea, and I make up a song using the idea and in between times, I wait for the next idea. It’s hard to say that a year from now I’m going to be doing this music or that music. It really depends on what words I come up with. That’s what determines the shape of the music more than anything else.”