With the country’s economic and social fabric seeming to deteriorate more and more each day, it’s easy to see why so many musicians write songs about despair. It’s difficult to find concrete reasons for hope, and it’s harder still to make a positive statement without sounding insipid and naive. What made Bruce Cockburn’s recent appearance at the Riviera so welcome was that he avoided this trap, delivering a message of hope and affirmation in the face of the grave problems his songs describe without sounding self-satisfied or insincere.
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Stealing Fire and the records that followed (World of Wonders and Big Circumstance) brought Cockburn some recognition as an articulate and compassionate political artist, but not the commercial success that performers such as U2 and Midnight Oil (tackling subject matter similar to Cockburn’s) attained during pop music’s post-Live Aid era of heightened political sensibility. That’s in part because his lyrical reach sometimes exceeds his grasp, resulting in clumsy and overwrought poetry. Even “If a Tree Falls,” Cockburn’s stirring plea on behalf of the planet’s endangered rain forests, contains such deathless lines as “Take out trees . . . inject a billion burgers worth of beef / Grain eaters / Methane dispensers.”
The singer enhanced that quiet by enlisting roots-rock cult hero T-Bone Burnett to produce his new record, Nothing but a Burning Light, which provided nearly half of the material for the Riv concert. Burnett’s economical, nuanced production eschewed Cockburn’s recent penchant for jazz keyboards and world-music explorations to focus on his chief assets: the husky bass voice, country blues melodies that would sound at home on Bob Dylan’s early records, and electric guitar playing that marries jazz chords with Carl Perkins finger picking and twang to sound like a more biting Mark Knopfler. Larry Klein’s tasteful bass playing, Jim Keltner’s stealthy drumming, and especially the gospel organ fills of Booker T. Jones (of “Green Onions” fame) add to Burning Light’s subtle pleasures, enhancing its hushed, almost reverential quality. The result is a record of tuneful, contemplative folk songs, brisk, sunny exultations of country life, and haunting rock (“A Dream Like Mine”).
What’s remarkable is that he witnessed such atrocities without losing hope. It doesn’t seem coincidental that he followed “Rocket Launcher” with the Celtic-tinged “Child of the Wind,” which contains these lines: “Little round planet / In a big universe / Sometimes it looks blessed / Sometimes it looks cursed / Depends on what you look at, obviously / But even more it depends on the way that you see.” What keeps that statement from being as unsupportably precious as the song’s unfortunate title is that Cockburn’s talking about totalitarian repression, environmental madness, the continuing oppression of native North Americans. Knowing that he can pay attention to such things and remain hopeful rather than feel the need to shield himself from them gives his affirmation depth and makes it heartening.
That such glimpses of a better world are fleeting perhaps matters less than the fact that they occur at all. On “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” Cockburn declares, “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.” Banishing the hopelessness, cheap cynicism, and insularity that are the easiest responses to this frightening world, Cockburn affirmed for a few hours that, though the obstacles are many and great, the light is still worth hoping and working for.
