Bruce Cockburn (born May 27, 1945) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist. His song styles range from folk to jazz-influenced rock, and his lyrics cover a broad range of topics that reveal a passion for human rights, environmental issues, politics, and spirituality. Cockburn has written more than 300 songs on thirty albums over a career spanning 40 years. Twenty Cockburn records have received a Canadian gold or platinum certification as of 2013, and he has sold nearly one million albums in Canada alone. (More from Wikipedia)
Bruce Cockburn is a popular folk/rock singer-songwriter from Canada who has an eclectic musical style that incorporates elements from many forms of music. He is often described as Canada’s biggest secret. Raised in Ottawa, Ontario, he was agnostic in his youth but became a Christian early in his musical career. Particularly in the 1970’s, his albums spoke of his Christianity alongside calls for human rights and environmentalism, a welcome blend of belief systems when it seems that the only Christians heard about these days are right-wingers. Indeed, Bruce Cockburn began toning down his religious beliefs by the 1980’s in order to distance himself from the Christian right in America. During this period, he scored his biggest American hit, “Wondering Where the Lions Are” in 1979.
After a time, he became more political in his beliefs and more polemic in his performances, culminating in his excellent album Stealing Fire (1984). The first single from the album, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” was inspired by seeing children expressing romantic love in a school playground. His next release from the album was the first overtly political Bruce Cockburn single, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”. Cockburn wrote this song after visiting Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico following political unrest in that country. As Wikipedia describes it: “In the song, [Bruce] Cockburn despairs of waiting for a political solution to the crisis, and expresses the desire to take matters into his own hands. Each verse ends with a line stating what Cockburn would do if he had a rocket launcher: in the first verse, I’d make somebody pay; in the second, I would retaliate; in the third, I would not hesitate. The fourth and final verse ends with the song’s most famous and controversial lyric: ‘If I had a rocket launcher, some son-of-a-bitch would die.’”
In light of this next single, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” was re-interpreted by many as referring to the same Guatemalan refugee crisis that inspired “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”, or to the AIDS epidemic that was beginning to sweep the world in those days. Bruce Cockburn has said that he was pleased by both of these later interpretations.
A tribute album to Bruce Cockburn was released on Intrepid Records in 1991, called Kick at the Darkness. The opening track is a cover of “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Barenaked Ladies and was their first major hit in their home country of Canada, helping to launch their career.
(November 2014)
