Bruce Cockburn, an appreciation

I wanted to write something more substantial than "I GET TO SEE BRUCE COCKBURN ON SATURDAY SQUEEEE!", so: here is why I am all a-squee, though I don't have any server space onto which to actually upload music.

There's a black-and-white crow on the back of a two-toned sheep in a field of broken yellow stalks below looming cliffs.
High above the plain, little gray houses blend with giant jagged boulders, and pale wheathered stumps.
Life in the ghost of the bush.

That's some imagery, right there. This is the kind of imagery that can carry a song for almost seven minutes with very little actual singing--mostly it's spoken-word, with a background of fingerpicked guitar. Later, in the same song:

Pearl held in black fingers
Is the moon behind dried trees

I really admire this: it's vivid, and specific, and surprising.

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

It helps that Cockburn's politics align very well with mine--even though I think that, generally, his political songs are far from his best. Part of it is that I don't listen to very much music with any particular political slant, and given how much more left-wing I am than the average North Carolinian, I am a bit thrilled that anyone would write a song this angry about the IMF. Or a song at all about the IMF, for that matter.

I woke up thinking about Turkish drummers.
Didn't take long.
I don't know much about Turkish drummers.
But it made me think of Germany, and the guy who sold me cigarettes
Who'd been in the Afghan secret police
Who made the observation
That it's hard
To live

I don't know of any other opening lines in music that charm me as much as those do, with dry wit that fades into something else--by the end of the song, paranoia, resistance, activism.

Cockburn, more than almost any songwriter I know of, pays a great deal of attention to nature, and you wouldn't necessarily think you could get an interesting song out of that (I'm the girl who skipped past all the moors when I read the Brontes in high school)--but it's where his nature writing meets his mystical leanings that I find some of my favorite songs. There's probably none I like more than "Isn't That What Friends Are For?":

I've been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I've formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door

That verse made me cry like a little girl for three months; and even now, it sends shivers down my spine. It's just one of those things that makes me go, "Yes, that's exactly it, that is exactly what I want to say, to all the people I care about when they're going through bad times."


Finally:
-He sings in French. That earns some points right there.
-The way he plays guitar. I'm not in the habit of envying musicians because they're all so far above anything I can do, but: envy envy envy.

GIP #2

(The Japanese, which in the previous icon read 'fast as the wind,' now reads 'fast as a duck.' This doesn't exactly qualify as a pun; more as a comment on my level of physical ability. Or it's just me being silly.