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Then there's the theory that he's a political songwriter. In songs like "If I Had a Rocket Launcher," "Call It Democracy" or "Stolen Land," Cockburn comes across as someone with a well-defined sense of right and wrong, and few reservations about keeping score for the rest of us. Nor does he mind stepping into touchy issues like Latin American politics, or the difficulty of remaining pacifist in the face of the horrors of war.
But Cockburn won't be so easily corralled. Although he happily admits to both message-song and folk-music tendencies, he's hesitant to allow his work to be defined by either label. "Maybe I'm a victim of my own distaste for doing one thing for too long," he suggests.
Speaking over the phone from his hotel room in Chicago, Cockburn cites another Bruce as an example. "I listen to somebody like Springsteen," he says. "Nobody has a problem figuring out what he is. But look at the spectrum of music he's done. His music, in a way, is more like folk music than anybody else's on the major scene, and yet there's never been any real problem with figuring out what it was. It's a funny thing, that.
"I certainly don't have any convenient label to offer to describe what I do," he adds. "l've tried to come up with one from time to time, and it has never really fit."
Nor is his hesitancy at hanging a label on what he does restricted to matters of musical style; Cockburn is equally reluctant to file his lyrics under the heading Protest Songs.
"Some of the songs are obviously that," he admits, "but no. I write songs because I've got an urge to write songs, and I write them about whatever moves me. Beyond that, there's a certain amount of maneuvering and what-not, the juggling of words to make sure they say what I want them to say, and that they're intelligible and all.
"I don't see it as selling messages, particularly. After the fact. yeah. 'Rocket Launcher' is about the situation in Guatemala and my feelings about the refugee camps; the song 'Nicaragua' is about Nicaragua. When you sing it, it becomes a message because it's being sung to people. But it didn't start out as a propaganda piece or anything.
"I have an abhorrence of getting into propaganda writing," he adds, "and I try to make sure that what I write is not that or is not too likely to be construed as that. Inevitably, there's going to be someone who will; there was a reviewer in L.A. who obviously didn't like the politics, and he had nice things to say about the music but he referred to the lyrics of the songs as 'knee-jerk leftist rhetoric,' which I don't think it is."
Still, Cockburn believes that "most of the people who come appreciate the difference between somebody who's making a comment on something that they've felt and seen, and who's just trying to influence opinions."
 "I write [songs]," Bruce Cockburn says, "about whatever moves me... I don't see it as selling messages, particularly." |
"Songwriting, by the fact that it combines music and words, can become more than those things, but you almost always have to sacrifice some element of either the music or the words in order to make them fit together.
"I'm usually working from the words," he points out. "The words determine the shape of the music, so that's going to be the focus; the music can go in any direction, but it does have to leave room for the words to make sense."
As they should. "I work on the songs in the hope that they will be intelligible to people," he says, "and people will understand what I mean them to be. But there's going to be a lot of potential meaning there that I don't see and other people will. That's just the difference in any two people's experience -- you've got to live with that."
Occasionally, Cockburn is annoyed by the reaction one of his songs will get -- speaking of "Rocket Launcher," he gripes that "there's always one or two who'll holler when they hear, 'Some son-of-a-bitch would die,' as if it's a cute thing" -- but he's more often intrigued by what his listeners take from his songs. Things got particularly interesting on that front in 1980, after Cockburn's song "Wondering Where the Lions Are" broke into the Top 40 and built Cockburn a reputation as some sort of mystic Christian pop star. Typically, the singer shrugs off the tag -- "I was, and am, a Christian; 'mystic' is a term that gets thrown around rather loosely," he says -- but admits to having been fascinated by the response it earned him.
"The record company we were with back then was trying to promote my stuff in the secular market and being told it was too Christian, and was then going to the Christian market and being told it wasn't Christian enough," he laughs. "but I did acquire a lot of listeners who were Christian also, because there's great hunger for some thinking music in that scene. People who are reluctant to get to involved in 'secular' music are faced with having to listen to a lot of drivel, mostly, and they know that. Or some of them know that.
"So when somebody like me comes along offering music with a little broader perspective to it, but still Christian, they like it.
"Some of them got a little nervous when I started talking about politics," he adds, "because you're not supposed to do that if you're a certain type of Christian -- especially if you're a songwriter. I got a lot of letters from people, especially after the album 'Stealing Fire,' and there were a lot of people in the Christian scene who found 'If I had a Rocket Launcher' very difficult. Because they weren't used to thinking about those things.
"There were a lot of Christians who did understand it, the more liberal, for want of a better word, turn of mind," he points out. Nonetheless, "A lot of people wrote letters urging me, exhorting me, not to lose the way. At no point was I threatened with excommunication, but there was definitely a kind of standing back and going, 'What is this?' on the part of a lot of people."
Cockburn may upset even more listeners with one of his new songs. "Gospel of Bondage," which, he says, is "addressed to the so-called Christian right in America." But he doesn't worry. "I am a Christian songwriter," he says. "I just don't fit the Christian music scene."
In other words, he prefers not to be labeled on any level -- which, in the long run, seems to be what keeps his music so interesting.
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When: March 21, 8 p.m. Where: Shriver Hall, Johns Hopkins University Tickets: $15.50 Call: 461-6000 |