© 1991 Macleans
 | Subscribe to Maclean's. |
NOTHING BUT A BURNING LIGHT
Bruce Cockburn
(True North/Sony)
For more than 20 years, Bruce Cockburnhas established himself as the conscience of Canadian pop music, a passionate artist who has won over critics and listeners with songs about nature, spirituality and social injustice. Yet outside the country, Cockburn is a cult figure with only a small following. That may all change with Nothing but a Burning Light, his 20th album but his first to get a big marketing push in the United States from a major label. Produced by respected veteran T-Bone Burnett in Los Angeles, the record is a near-masterpiece brimming with fresh ideas.
The album's brilliance lies as much in the production as in the songs themselves. Cockburn's choice of Burnett, a superb craftsman who has worked with such artists as Elvis Costello and Richard Thompson, was inspired. The producer, who also plays guitar on several tracks, strips down Cockburn's sound to its essentials without returning the musician to his folkie roots. The result is a series of vibrant, sometimes bluesy numbers that feature acoustic bass, violin and even washboard. Added to that is a distinctly 1960s undertone, brought about by the surf-rock style of Cockburn's guitar playing and by the presence of organist Booker T. Jones, a veteran rhythm-and-blues artist of that era.
The album, which includes guest appearances by singers Jackson Browne and Sam Phillips, contains some of Cockburn's most poignant and heartfelt lyrics to date. A gentle romantic ballad, "One of the Best Ones", pronounces: "There's no snake oil or pill/Can make love less painful or fine." And "Cry of a Tiny Babe", a sometimes comical but ultimately profound expression of religious faith, uses 1990s vernacular to describe the birth of Christ.
On the evidence of the new recording, the firebrand Cockburn, who once recorded the lyrics "If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die," has not tempered his politics. Two songs touch on the condition of natives both past and present, and "Mighty Trucks of Midnight" is a damning indictment of free trade. But ultimately, the new album reveals a happier, more satisfied Cockburn, nowhere more clearly than on the unabashedly joyful "Great Big Love", a celebration of his life in the country, where he has taken up such pastimes as riding and target shooting. "Got a woman I love and she loves me/And we live on a piece of land/I never know quite how to measure these things/But I guess I'm a happy man." More than anything else on Nothing but a Burning Light, that song, with its infectiously sunny melody, seems likely to finally take Cockburn to the top of the international charts.