The tone changed in 1980 with the release of Humans, a beautiful, gritty, sad chronicle of the end of Cockburn’s marriage. If Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” could be set to music, then Cockburn may have done it with Humans. It is the sound of loneliness and isolation, desperation and, finally, newfound hope and healing. “Bloody nose and burning eyes / Raised in laughter to the skies” is the way Cockburn expressed it, and for many of his fans it remains his best album. That is, if “best” is not too callous a word to describe traumatic events that seem so acutely painful that listening to them almost feels like a violation of privacy.

The love is still there. It’s always been there, in fact. Cockburn still sings about God, as well as about human love. Sometimes he merges them together and doesn’t even try to sort them out, just lets the inscrutable truth hang there pure and unadorned, as he did in a 1992 song called “One of the Best Ones”:

There are eight million mysteries
In the naked body
Can't even sight on some distant horizon
Like the nine billion names of God
Don't bring you any closer
To anyone you can simply set eyes on
But in the same way it's as real
Don't always recognize what I feel
But of the dancing scenes that life reveals
This is one of the best ones

I carried that song around with me a few months ago, thinking about my approaching 20th wedding anniversary. It was my own private soundtrack to a marriage. Nine billion names for God, 7,300 days, a thousand obstinate, pigheaded moments, one woman, and some kind of alchemy that turned the dross to gold. You can’t put that in a creedal statement, but Bruce Cockburn got it exactly right.

It’s fitting that a consummate songwriter like Bruce Cockburn should have the last word, and the last word on You’ve Never Seen Everything is “hope.” “It’s bigger than you can imagine,” he sings on “Messenger Wind,” the album’s final song. “Now it’s forever.” It is a devout wish, a wistful memory, a defense against the darkness, a kind of prayer.

Messenger wind swooping out of the sky
Lights each sunny speck
in the human kaleidoscope
With hope.

Hope is the golden thread that runs through all of Cockburn’s songs, through all of those 27 albums, even in the litanies of destruction and devastation. It’s one of the many reasons why I love the man’s music. He finds time and again that precarious balance between the blood, lust, greed and inhumanity on one hand and the buoyant, irrepressible hope for change on the other.

A long time ago Bruce Cockburn sang, “I carry these scars so precious and rare / And tonight I feel like I’m made of air.” That was a time when he found the balance in a mere two lines. Other times it floats there in the wind, at the tail end of a world-weary, despairing recitation of horror, in the last line of the title track of his latest album. Then “you’ve never seen everything” becomes more than just a reminder of the depths to which humans will sink, but a defiant promise that even here, broadcasting live from the gates of hell, the demons can be put to flight. Hold on, there’s always more.

Bruce Cockburn has been delivering on that promise for 33 years. It’s a promise well made and well kept on his latest album, one in an ongoing series of searing, uplifting dispatches from the front.