© 1994 Macleans
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Where have all the flowers gone/
Long time passing?
--Folk standard by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickson
Long time, indeed. Many veterans of the folk-music boom of the 1960s and 1970s, now well into middle age, have settled for comfortable retirement--venturing out only for an occasional appearance on the nostalgia circuit. Not so with Ian Tyson, Bruce Cockburn and Richard Thompson, all active and highly respected singer-songwriters. Tyson, having traded in the folk songs of his Ian & Sylvia days for a genuine cowboy repertoire, is currently enjoying a new lease on musical life. Cockburn and Thompson, meanwhile, although still rooted in folk traditions, have expanded their music into contemporary styles. But what really sets the three artists apart, as new albums by each of them prove, is a consistent knack for writing personal songs with a universal resonance.
At 60, Ian Tyson is a grand old man of Canadian song. His classic tunes from the past (Four Strong Winds, Someday Soon) may have bought him a ranch in Alberta, but it's his recent cowboy compositions (Navajo Rug, Casey Tibbs) that have brought him a new audience. And his sixth cowboy album, the first-rate Eighteen Inches of Rain (Stony Plain/Warner), may lasso his largest group of listeners to date. Songs like the lively polka Horsethief Moon and the slow waltz Rodeo Road are as smooth as a well-worn saddle. And there's a bracing honesty to numbers like Nobody Thought It Would, about Tyson's marriage to a young waitress. At times, his values can sound prehistoric: the title track gives equal weight to women, horses and cattle.
But Tyson can also write meaningfully, and lovingly, about life in the West. While chronicling an endangered way of life, he is turning cynical city slickers into yodelling buckaroos.
Like Tyson's, Bruce Cockburn's music is deeply woven into the fabric of Canadian culture. His compositions, dealing with both internal and external landscapes, have long reflected the songwriter's affinity for nature as well as his spiritual and political concerns. Often, Cockburn has appeared serious in the extreme. But on Dart to the Heart (True North/Sony), the 48-year-old artist sounds positively giddy, singing about love in its many manifestations.
Produced by T-Bone Burnett, who also worked on Cockburn's 1991 release, Nothing but a Burning Light, the new album opens and closes with wild abandon: "Listen for the Laugh", a full-tilt boogie, prescribes an openness towards love, while "Tie Me at the Crossroads", an amusing, frenzied rocker, proposes a similar acceptance of death. In between, the songs deal mostly with romantic matters. The swaying "Someone I Used to Love" insists: I never want you to be/Just a page in my history.
Besides the album's upbeat tone, the biggest surprise is the urgent clarity of Cockburn's lyrics on songs like the bluesy "Burden of the Angel/Beast."
Despite a few weak cuts, overall Dart to the Heart hits the bull's eye. Obviously now a happy camper, Cockburn--even after 22 albums--continues to find new sources of inspiration.
Britain's Richard Thompson has much in common with Cockburn. Like his Canadian counterpart, 44-year-old Thompson is a gifted guitarist and a songwriter who has been the subject of at least one tribute album. Over the course of his career, first with Fairport Convention, then with his wife, Linda, and more recently as a solo performer, Thompson has demonstrated the depth and range of a consummate artist. His command of styles runs the gamut from folk and blues to jazz and rock. And his songs are consistently funny, literate and largely bleak (so much so that his fans nicknamed him Mr. Doom-and-Gloom).
Thompson's eighth solo album, Mirror Blue (EMI), adds quirky junkyard percussion to his musical palette. And while there are shades of Neil Young in For the Sake of Mary and the Rolling Stones in Mascara Tears, the album is brimming with originality. In Celtic-style rockers, Thompson offers a savage indictment of McDonald's (Fast Food) and a witty tribute to sports cars (MGB-GT). There's also a hilarious rockabilly number, Shane & Dixie, about a hapless modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.
But the best tracks are ballads that seem to be about women from Thompson's past. The touching King of Bohemia, about a fallen angel, ``a refugee from the seraphim,'' features some of Thompson's finest writing: If tears unshed could heal your heart/If words unsaid could sway/Then watch you melt into the night/With adieu, and rue the day. Like former folkies Tyson and Cockburn, Thompson proves that, no matter what style the music, nothing works quite as well as a heartfelt lyric.