Bruce Cockburn set to perform at the Vilar

In the past 50 years, Bruce Cockburn has written over 400 songs on more than 35 albums, 23 of which have earned gold or platinum certification.

His accolades include 13 JUNO Awards and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and inductions into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame; he’s also an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Early rock ‘n’ roll artists, like Elvis Presley and The Crickets, initially influenced him, but he quickly turned his attention to jazz, starting college with an aim to compose music for large jazz ensembles. But then he discovered songwriting, which dovetailed with his interest in poetry. So he dropped out of music school and worked with a handful of bands in the mid- to late-1960s.

“None of them were very good, and none of them had much of the future, but in that roughly five-year period, I became a songwriter, basically,” he said. “I had the musical interest, and I had studied enough music and been exposed to a lot of different kinds of music, so I had a very eclectic approach.”

He always believed lyrics should have meaning, so he focused on writing about topics that triggered an emotional response within, be it relationships, social injustice or environmental threats.

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“(We’re) living in all that beauty and all that grandeur that is constantly under threat. One of the ways that I can respond to the threat is to write about it, if I feel sufficiently motivated. I can’t fake it. If I try to write a song deliberately on a topic, and I think, ‘Oh, I should write about blah, blah, it doesn’t work. I come up with a crappy song. But if I wait around for the emotional impact to be there, then the song has possibilities,” he said.

Spirituality, politics and diverse musical interests have shaped his career, though his paramount focus revolves around God; everything else comes after that, he said.

“Although in practice, of course, in day-to-day (life), it’s not always front and center, but that’s the intention. It starts there, and from that springs everything else. I mean, we owe each other love and respect,” he said.

He believes that spirituality and politics eventually overlap when dealing with real-world problems like hunger.

“At every point, there’s that interface where your attempts to engage in humanitarian work run up against politics either because you want to generate support in your own community or because you’re being resisted by somebody with vested interests,” he said. “You can’t not connect these things, but it is a balancing act. If you let the political side take over, then you end up making shallow decisions, I think. You need to keep track of the depth spirituality offers — that extra dimension.”

He honors great songwriters that emerged from Canada, like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, and, while he also credits American and other songwriters, he views music that stems from Canada as having a different quality.

“I used to describe it as kind of a sense of space in the music. There’s more landscape. Margaret Atwood wrote a short book about this — not with respect to songwriting, but with respect to prose and Canadian writing in particular — and she made a point that the Canadian landscape looms very large in the culture. It’s a huge country with not that many people in it,” he said. “There’s so much emptiness in it … you have to travel huge distances before you can get to the next gig.”

As a result, travel, as well as nature, shows up in many of his songs.

He’s probably best known for his 1979 song “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” which depicts finding peace, courage and a connection to nature despite global conflict. 

Inspiration for the song came during a dinner with a relative who worked in international security at a time when no one was sure if China had nuclear weapons or not.

“At the time, Russia and China were shooting at each other across their mutual border sporadically,” he said. “So there was this huge concern around where this confrontation between the two countries would go. In the end, it kind of blew over. But at the time, the story was that as far as we knew, we could wake up, and it’d be the end of the world. I honestly didn’t feel like that, but it was an awesome thing to hear over filet mignon. And so I woke up the next morning, the sun was shining and everything was nice. I had had a dream a year or two earlier — a terrifying dream of lions breaking into my house, breaking down the doors and coming after me. So in this second dream about lions, they were at a safe distance, and they were just looking regal and beautiful walking around the streets of Ottawa. Those two things kind of flowed together: It’s a beautiful morning, the world’s not over and the lions are nice. The song mostly was (Canadian) nature imagery … almost all my songs seem to be about death and dying in some way. Either you’re expecting it, or you’re not expecting it. That song kind of expects it. The lions represent what is out there that threatens us.”

In his title track for “O Sun, O Moon,” released in 2023, he writes: “Time takes its toll, but in my soul, I’m on a roll.” Recorded in Nashville with his longtime producer Colin Linden, the record reflects more spiritual than topical issues with both simplicity and clarity, yet still highlights his driving resonator guitar.

“I think it’s a product of age to a certain extent, and seeing the approaching horizon,” he said, adding in a good-natured tone: “I think these are exactly the kind of songs that an old guy writes.”

His next project involves a collection of favorite cover songs.