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.
