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But in these clay-footed times, "morality" is not a word that falls easily from the tongue.
"It's a word that's been cheapened by association with things like the Moral Majority," Cockburn says from an office in Toronto. "Or... if not cheapened, at least loaded with all kinds of baggage that I don't particularly want to apply to it."
In Rocket Launcher, his anger (at the way war devours innocents who cannot move out of its path) boils over into the payoff, "If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die."
That mild expletive is a fierce statement from a man who usually tries to understand the forces he opposes.
In Tibetan Side of Town, one of the standout songs during his set at last year's Verde Valley School Music Festival, Cockburn contrasts his own circumstances with the life he observes in Katmandu, leaving us to wonder who is better off.
His sensitivity to moral hues flows from his Christian beliefs.
"If I try to understand what it means to be a Christian, I look at the two instructions that were given in the Bible that are paramount,... and those are to love God with all your heart and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That's it."
That's one of the reasons he'll be playing Saturday at the festival, which benefits the school's Native American Scholarship Fund. The appearance will mark his third time on the bill. (The Native American group Burning Sky plans to play his song Indian Wars at the show.)
With 22 albums out, Cockburn has racked up gold and platinum albums in Canada and a raft of music awards there, but in the United States he achieved his highest profile with Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws (the 1979 album that produced Wondering Where the Lions Are) and Stealing Fire (the 1986 album that Rocket Launcher came from).
"I would say that the States is catching up fast, most of it. There are big holes in the U.S. where I don't go," he says. "We do well in the sort of northern Midwest -- in Chicago, Madison (Wis.), Minneapolis, all that -- but once you get out into the flatlands, there's a lot of territory to cross before you get to the next gig."
At 50 years old, Cockburn is a long way from the days when he first picked up a guitar as a teenager in Ottawa. It was a quiet town, he says, a place where kids had to make their own excitement.
"There was a lot more music than the size of the place would indicate," he says.
"I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were."
Then toward the end of his high-school days, he was whomped up the side of the head by Bob Dylan and the Beatles.
"I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.
"The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me. I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and... that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon... made my first album."
Musically, Cockburn started out as a child of folk and rock. But as he grew, the texture of influences and styles grew more sophisticated. The dreams of his rock and roll childhood blossomed into an adult livelihood.
"All I ever thought was, 'I'm going to do this as long as I can, and if I can't get paid at it, I'll be a bum doing it.' And so, here I am.
"I'm not quite a bum."