7:56pm Lovers In A Dangerous Time by Bruce Cockburn from Stealing Fire
#KJAC #TheColoradoSound #BruceCockburn
#BruceCockburn
Ted Tocks Covers
Stolen Land
Originally posted on September 29, 2022
On this day of #TruthandReconciliation
“If you’re like me you’d like to think we’ve learned from our mistakes
Enough to know we can’t play god with others’ lives at stake
So now we’ve all discovered the world wasn’t only made for whites
What step are you gonna take to try and set things right in this stolen land?”
Bruce Cockburn: Lyrical Genius and Activist 📜
Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics have walked the line between poetic & political.
Since the '70s, the #Canadian singer-songwriter has woven environmentalism, spirituality, & human rights into intricate arrangements. With tracks like If I Had a Rocket Launcher & Lovers in a Dangerous Time, he shaped folk-rock into a vehicle for both introspection and action. 🇨🇦 #Canada #BruceCockburn #CanadianMusic #FolkRock
Ted Tocks Covers - Year 8 - Day 71
Turn, Turn, Turn
Going back decades and centuries with The Byrds, Pete Seeger and Ecclesiastes
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”
#PeteSeeger #thebyrds #Ecclesiastes #TheLimeliters #judycollins #ninasimone #verngosdin #brucecockburn #DollyParton #wilsonphillips #brucespringsteen #chrisdeburgh #walkofftheearth
Today I was listening to "Life Short Call Now" by Bruce Cockburn (2006)
#music #listening #BruceCockburn
One of if not THE most successful cover bands in #Canadian history the @barenakedladies.com! For @charlieangus104.bsky.social and #Canada 🇨🇦
"Youve gotta kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight" - #LoversInADangerousTime, #BruceCockburn
youtu.be/k_oOc3Zj0KU?...
Barenaked Ladies - Lovers in a...
Bruce Cockburn: Lyrical Genius and Activist 📜
Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics have walked the line between poetic & political.
Since the '70s, the #Canadian singer-songwriter has woven environmentalism, spirituality, & human rights into intricate arrangements. With tracks like If I Had a Rocket Launcher & Lovers in a Dangerous Time, he shaped folk-rock into a vehicle for both introspection and action. 🇨🇦 #Canada #BruceCockburn #CanadianMusic #FolkRock
Today I was listening to "In The Falling Dark" by Bruce Cockburn (1976)
#music #listening #BruceCockburn
Bruce Cockburn, Waiting for a Miracle: Singles 1970-1987, 1987 on True North
Collection of singles from Canada’s Bruce Cockburn, whose career ranged widely from folk to what we might call world music to rock. Cockburn was a Berklee School of Music dropout before being a dropout from Berkelee was de rigeur.
I first found Cockburn via “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” and his association with various activist musicians in the 80s. He also worked with T-Bone Burnett on a few albums in the 80s.
True North is an independent Canadian label (founded by Bernie Finkelstein) with distribution by CBS and they still put out Bruce Cockburn’s music.
My copy—via VInyl Destination in Lowell, MA—is a Canadian pressing by CBS Records Canada from the Don Mills Ontario plant.
#1980s #1987 #BruceCockburn #CBSRecordsCanada #DonMills #LowellMA #TrueNorth #vinyl #VinylDestination #vinylcollection #vinylfinds
Bruce Cockburn: Lyrical Genius and Activist 📜
Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics have walked the line between poetic & political.
Since the '70s, the #Canadian singer-songwriter has woven environmentalism, spirituality, & human rights into intricate arrangements. With tracks like If I Had a Rocket Launcher & Lovers in a Dangerous Time, he shaped folk-rock into a vehicle for both introspection and action. 🇨🇦 #Canada #BruceCockburn #CanadianMusic #FolkRock
Bruce Cockburn: Lyrical Genius and Activist 📜
Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics have walked the line between poetic & political.
Since the '70s, the #Canadian singer-songwriter has woven environmentalism, spirituality, & human rights into intricate arrangements. With tracks like If I Had a Rocket Launcher & Lovers in a Dangerous Time, he shaped folk-rock into a vehicle for both introspection and action. 🇨🇦 #Canada #BruceCockburn #CanadianMusic #FolkRock
#BruceCockburn nearly walked away from songwriting after finishing his 600-page memoir. But a Canadian poet, a documentary, and a street-corner ranter helped pull him back in.
In our conversation, the Canadian icon opens up about spirituality vs. politics, and why honors like the Songwriters Hall of Fame feel a little… premature.
#OnThisDay in 1945, #BruceCockburn, Canadian folk rock singer-songwriter ("Wondering Where the Lions Are"; "If I Had a Rocket Launcher"), born in Ottawa, Ontario.
#HappyBirthday #80 🎉🎂🎀💗🥳
Bruce Cockburn: Lyrical Genius and Activist 📜
Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics have walked the line between poetic & political.
Since the '70s, the #Canadian singer-songwriter has woven environmentalism, spirituality, & human rights into intricate arrangements. With tracks like If I Had a Rocket Launcher & Lovers in a Dangerous Time, he shaped folk-rock into a vehicle for both introspection and action. 🇨🇦 #Canada #BruceCockburn #CanadianMusic #FolkRock
Bruce Cockburn Sings “The Trouble with Normal”
Listen to this track by one-time mystic folkie turned world traveling political songwriter Bruce Cockburn. It’s “The Trouble with Normal”, the title track to his 1983 album. With the prompting and aid of several NGOs just before this record came out, Bruce Cockburn found himself packing a bag and getting on planes so he could see worlds that not many North American citizens got to see; those regions which are violently impacted by policies mandated by corporations and governments at home.
By this time, Cockburn was also expanding his sound by incorporating new wave, jazz fusion, art rock, reggae, and world music to his already sturdy folk-rock sound. Cockburn shifted his sound in other ways. He took on a new approach to production and arrangements that present his new material as a united front with his band rather than focusing on his detailed guitar work. This period kicked off a new phase for Cockburn as a songwriter, too. He began to supplant the spiritual abstracts evidenced in his earlier material in favour of more earthbound and confrontational subject matter that has him examining global trends and events with a critical eye.
In this respect and in others, The Trouble with Normal album was a template and first entry in a trilogy of records that now includes Stealing Fire (1984) and World of Wonders (1986). These releases share similar thematic emphases and a sonic palette between them. The songs serve as travelogues to some of the world’s most troubled locales and provide details as to why they are so troubled. At the same time, Cockburn’s material presents affectionate portraits of the people who live in those regions and who get on with their work and lives and families despite everything.
This title track from The Trouble With Normal is the record’s thesis statement, highlighting some of the underhanded tactics in campaigns of economic imperialism by the U.S in Central America and other regions. But it also includes references to workers’ rights in North America, with strikes for higher wages met by scab labour and mass firings to keep working people desperate and in their place. Most importantly of all, it touches on the attitudes of the average person in the street who often seems frustratingly disconnected from the issues and their social implications.
Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees
Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local Third World’s kept on reservations you don’t see
“It’ll all go back to normal if we put our nation first”
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse …~ “The Trouble with Normal” by Bruce Cockburn
The central function that keeps the machine well-oiled and running is these attitudes of regular citizens. It’s our acceptance of bad faith practices and the denial of the grievous costs paid by others that justifies and perpetuates a slowly worsening status quo. In this, Cockburn presents his main takeaway. The “centrist” view on global economics, government policy, the public good, and what is perceived to be normal and stable is not a fixed value and never has been. In fact, being in the so-called center during times of grave injustice is such a slippery position that it barely registers as a position at all.
When a planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage, the “center” gets pulled right along with it. We’ve certainly seen this phenomenon play out this year, and to disastrous effect. We’ve seen what can happen when movements like this are met without resistance and are greeted with concessions instead, seemingly ignorant of history. Examining how this plays out goes beyond misplaced senses of balance and “both-sidesing” the issues at hand.
Defining what normal means demands context. It relies on a keen sense of discernment from every citizen. It demands a universal dedication to truth. We must decide on what normal or acceptable are guided by how our society can and should benefit as many people as possible, wherever they live. Social stability and people’s lives depend on it.
The issues “The Trouble with Normal” raises haven’t changed very much today, even when most of what it comments on seems like old news by now. We know that corporations and governments do dirty deals to get things done. We know that happens at the cost of human lives. By now, this is what normal feels like. In this, the trends, movements, practices, and patterns this song warned us about over forty years ago have come to their full fruition.
The back sleeve notes from Bruce Cockburn’s 1983 album The Trouble With Normal.This is what makes this song so impactful today; it’s still so infuriatingly relevant. One might call “The Trouble with Normal” downright prescient if today’s fascism and authoritarian structures hadn’t been so effectively modelled in the 1980s. This grinding devolution of the democratic dream took decades to unfold. But it felt normal to so many people the whole way along. Pretty soon, we became the little dog in the burning room declaring “this is fine“. Maybe we’ve always been that little dog.
As dense and politically incendiary as the lyrics are, they are as compelling as anything Cockburn wrote about spirituality and connections between the divine and the beauty found in the natural world. In fact, the anger in this song stems from his personal devotion to the sacred and to the central Christian tenet of “love thy neighbour as thyself”. Among other things, this is what made so much of what Cockburn writes about here particularly striking, given that a planet lurching to the right certainly included the increasingly enriched Christian Right – a trend that stands today more than ever.
Because Cockburn was so deliberate in personally experiencing how the tools of oppression really work on a global scale before writing about it, “The Trouble with Normal” escapes being a leftist political tract. Instead, it’s a set of firsthand observations in reaction to the documented practices of multinational business interests, governments, and their various agencies in exploited regions in the world. It’s a comment on how fear and insecurity can shape our perceptions domestically, too, and how that makes us prone to manipulation.
Yet in its anger, there’s also a sense of resolve, too. Whatever normal is, it’s our lot to work out what it means and what it doesn’t together in good faith with boldness as goalposts continue to shift.
Bruce Cockburn is an active songwriter and performer today. You can visit brucecockburn.com to learn more about his history, extensive discography, and upcoming shows.
Cockburn recorded an alternate version of “The Trouble with Normal” which appears on 1987’s Waiting for a Miracle compilation record. You can listen to that version right here.
To get a sense of Bruce Cockburn as a live act when this tune and others from its namesake album were brand new, check out the full Bruce Cockburn concert film Rumours of Glory. It was filmed in late 1981 and released the following year. The film features many of his jazz-rock and ensemble-oriented songs, plus a couple re-imagined gems from his early career.
Finally, check out this list of 20 Great Bruce Cockburn Songs, also by your humble host.
Enjoy!
#80sMusic #BruceCockburn #politicalMusic #PoliticalSongs #singerSongwriters
To fall down from starvation
Or some less humane fate
-- Bruce Cockburn, If I Had a Rocket Launcher (1983)
Pacing the Cage (Bruce Cockburn cover) by Eddie Biggins
Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done...
on somebody else
40 years ago this week, "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" by #BruceCockburn entered the #Top100 at 89. It peaked at 88 on 16 Feb 1985. It did better here in Canada, getting to 49, and I remember hearing it a lot on the radio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7vCww3j2-w #1980s #MusicHistory #MusicVideo
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