It’s not surprising to find Canadian singer, songwriter and humanitarian Bruce Cockburn calling from San Francisco. The West Coast has become a second home due to lengthy stays to be with his girlfriend. Not fond of air travel, he’s driven there multiple times, and previously to her former residence in Brooklyn. The meditative abilities brought on by the open road have become a significant source of inspiration. The miles spent on North American highways enabled him to write the material for his current album, Small Source of Comfort.
As he describes in the liner notes, he “had a vision of music, electric and noisy, with gongs and jackhammer and fiercely distorted guitars.” Instead, the solitude of driving plus the discovery of violinist Jenny Scheinman led to an intimate and introspective set of acoustic tunes that blend folk, blues, jazz and rock. Despite the lack of volume, the songs maintain a significant intellectual and emotional impact that’s customary for Cockburn, who has mixed personal and social politics over 31 studio albums. Relying on a sense of movement that mimics their creation, the songs become reflections that pass by like mile markers. Later, those interior musings branch out and acknowledge the fragility of existence when he recounts a Ramp Ceremony held for a fallen soldier in Kandahar, Afghanistan during “Each One Lost.” Still, it’s not all drama and darkness. A perverse sense of humor pops up where least expected. Besides the occasional lines, there is the scenario of “Call Me Rose,” where he imagines Richard Nixon reincarnated as a single mother with two children living in a housing project.
My conversation with Cockburn can’t help but mix music, politics, war and social change because that’s the landscape where his four decades as a solo artist resides.
JPG: With the Occupy Movement gaining steam but also attracting enemies, and your lengthy background with humanitarian efforts, I’m curious…how does one stay positive?
BC: (laughs) Umm…I think your ability to be positive depends on what you think the bottom line is in a way, and to some extent on your experiences, too, obviously. If you meet impressive people and get energized and feel like things can move in a positive direction because of those people then, of course, you’re going to have a more generally positive feeling about everything. And the opposite is also true. For me I don’t think about it much. I guess, I feel generally hopeful in my life but when I look around I can’t find a logical excuse for that. (slight laugh) So, it comes down to what’s in my heart, and I suppose no matter what happens to humanity the planet will continue, the universe will continue. If there’s a master plan for it all that will continue. We will have been, perhaps, disruptive of it for a moment or two but I don’t like to look at it that way. I feel like we have to promote the best in ourselves and hang on to that as a source of energy to, if not fix things, at least keep them from getting so bad that we can’t stand it, that we can’t survive it.
*JPG: It correlates for me to the title of your album, Small Source of Comfort. Finding something to hold on to, savor the little victories. *
BC: Yes. That’s okay to take it that way. When I gave the album that title, it’s a line from a song (“Five Fifty-One”). I just felt that the phrase itself made an effective title. I wasn’t thinking too much about what I was promoting by calling it that. In the song, of course, it’s a bit ironic because a small source of comfort, the sun came up. Okay. (laughs) This is the best that we can do. And some days it is the best that you can do. You’re not dead and neither is the world, but, other days, of course, things feel better.
I’m not offering myself as a small source of comfort although people have come back at me with that notion. I think looking at love and looking at beauty and looking at all these things that are still strong in us and in the world, regardless of the trouble we’re in, it’s easier to operate and easier to feel like you’re moving forward and, maybe, genuinely move forward. So, if the album points at anything to do with comfort it’s that.
*JPG: When you mention that it’s meant to be ironic – the idea that the sun coming up being a small source of comfort – but there are lines throughout the album that offer brief moments of humor. Even “Lois on the Autobahn” in its own way because the actual road has cars rushing by at 100-120 miles per hour, or whatever it translates to in meters, but the song sounds like a light little ditty, a relaxing drive in the country. *
BC: (laughs as I struggle to translate miles into meters) I’m old enough to be a veteran of miles. It is kind of humorous. Like instrumental pieces, they’re not about anything. They’re just a collection of notes that, hopefully, makes some sense and starts somewhere and goes somewhere and makes you feel something. But you have to give them titles. In that case everybody who heard it said, ‘Oh, it reminds me of being on the road or driving’, certainly not in the 120 mile-an-hour autobahn but just of being on the highway. My mom died that summer and it just seemed like she would appreciate being put on the autobahn. I don’t think she would have been happy with the 120 miles-an-hour thing but it just seemed like her moving on, her sailing on to wherever she goes next. It’s a light-hearted look at death. (laughs)
JPG: But the humor is a bit surprising because, overall, you’re viewed as a serious artist. A lot of people may even view you as angry. ‘He’s that guy who’s gonna use his rocket launcher once he gets one…’
BC: Yeah, I would have preferred a smiling picture [one CD cover], actually, but we didn’t have one that had the same graphic power that that had. So, we decided to use that. Sorry to interrupt you there.
JPG: No, that’s fine. That’s the way of a conversation. Is there a certain responsibility you have by being Bruce Cockburn, where you can’t be stinking drunk in public or you can’t walk out of a McDonald’s?
BC: I’ve done both of those things, certainly often, actually, over the years. Often may be overstating it but it’s not an uncommon thing on the highway. When you’re driving, sometimes McDonald’s is the only option. It’s not my preference, that’s for sure. There’s a certain responsibility I feel to be truthful in my art and be as good at it as I can be but I don’t feel that I have a responsibility beyond that to my audience particularly. I guess, if the art was completely inconsistent with how I lived there would be something wrong. It wouldn’t be truthful. Having said that, I like to drink wine. I like to laugh. Occasionally, even force myself to dance. I do all kinds of silly things.
People tend to take things seriously. It’s one thing to take your art seriously or your work, whatever it happens to be. I think it’s appropriate to do that and be as good as you can be at whatever you’re doing. But sometimes, people forget that we all have the capacity to party a bit and we all have the need to let off steam and you can’t be serious all the time or you crumble. A great illustration of that came back in the early ‘80s when I first started to travel, when I first went to Nicaragua, for instance, and all the people I knew that were involved in solidarity work with Central America were terribly serious and terribly official and everything was heavy duty. You get down there and people are in a friggin’ war for their survival and they’re partying at every opportunity, dancing and laughing. You think, ‘Oh yeah. Right.’ There’s a perspective here that we found. The perspective in that case was that the people who were really in it cherish every opportunity to celebrate life because it may end. And, of course, we’re all in that boat. Most of us can ignore it most of the time. But if you live in Iraq or if you live in Afghanistan or…Afghans are not famous for their partying, I guess, but Baghdad used to be famous as a party town before Bush invaded it. The capacity is there. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all. I think it’s totally healthy. If all you do is party there’s a problem there, too. But if you party instead of looking at reality, well, that’s a problem. You need to loosen up from time to time for your own survival.
JPG: That reminds me of friends of mine who were getting their masters degrees and wrote their papers on the Holocaust. Due to all the really depressing and shocking research that was involved their advisor recommended that in order to get their minds off the subject they should pay attention to something totally mindless…which is how they became fans of wrestling and NASCAR.
BC: (laughs) I totally get that, especially about NASCAR. (laughs) But it’s exciting — things that roar and go fast. That is exciting. I totally get it. The Holocaust is not…every time we learn something new about it it gets worse, and you think what you knew about it 30 years ago seemed to be as bad as it ever needed to get, but as more information surfaces, and people doing research like that, it gets worse and worse. Then, of course, you look around and you can find people doing a less scientific version of the same thing, where possible, today in the world and…you have to be able to step away from that.
JPG: You mentioned Afghanistan earlier. Are you familiar with the books Fire and War by Sebastian Junger.
BC: I know the name but I haven’t read his books.
JPG: The reason I bring it up is I recently finished Fire, which is a collection of his magazine articles with much of it finding him at one war-torn area after another. And it was interesting that in the later chapters he touched on the situation in Afghanistan as far as the political climate after the Soviets left and how the Taliban filled a void and took power in the area before 9/11.
BC: Which they’re going to do again. Talking about depressing outcomes. There’s a few good books on Afghanistan. I can’t remember the names of the authors but there’s a Canadian journalist who spent a lot of time with the Mujahedeen when they were fighting the Russians, who are essentially the same people, and he wrote a book called “War at the Top of the World.” He writes for one of the Toronto papers. It’s a powerful book about his experiences and his take on what it is we, quote unquote, are fighting.
It’s a tricky thing. From a military point of view if you’re gonna get into a war like that you’ve gotta be like the Romans. You’ve gotta be totally ruthless. You’ve gotta be so bad that you win. And as bad as we can be, we’ll never let ourselves be that bad. Thank God. The Romans went to war against Carthage. Okay, after three wars with them, they finally decided they had enough and they just exterminated the population, sold the survivors into slavery and bulldozed the city, basically plowed it under. There was absolutely nothing left. And if we want to beat someone like the Taliban and get them out of the world, that’s the way to do it but we’re not going to do that and I’m not suggesting we should. But if you’re not going to do that, don’t expect to win the war. You’ve gotta find some other way to get the job done than just beating them up. There was a U.S. Senator whose name I forget because I never quite noticed it who a couple years ago proposed the idea that we should buy the Afghan farmers’ opium at a rate higher than the Taliban are able to pay. And let them be the supply to the world because they’re growing it anyway. We need it. There’s a use for it, and let it be legitimate. That would take at least that aspect of the financing right out of the Taliban’s sack of resources and give those farmers a profitable thing to do, etc, etc. It just seemed like a really good idea, but there was a lobby against it by whoever controls the current supply of opium, the legitimate supply.
JPG: Isn’t there a saying, something like, ‘Winning the war with chocolates.’ That may have been the idea, maybe it was during World War II, of being friendly to the locals and getting them on your side.
BC: I think in World War II it wasn’t so much a question of winning over the locals because the locals were pretty pissed at the Germans already. They didn’t really need winning over but, although I guess, some of them were profiting from it, as people will.
With respect to Central America back in the day I felt that if somebody just went out, put in electrical power everywhere in Nicaragua and bought everybody a fridge, there would be no revolution. Everybody’d be comfortable enough that they wouldn’t need to revolt, even if their leaders were as brutal and horrible as they were, not the Sandinistas but their predecessors. There was a real good reason for a revolution in Nicaragua and part of the reason had to do with the complete absence of basic comforts and the ability to live a decent life. Had there been that ability, there probably wouldn’t have been a revolution. It’s hard to imagine a revolution in Canada, for instance, because everybody’s too damn comfortable. You could imagine an American revolution coming out of the South or coming out of Harlem or coming out of places where everyone has been foreclosed upon. The comfort factor is a major one when it comes to political upheaval.
JPG: That goes back to the Occupy Movement and people stepping up because they’ve had enough. And it’s grown to cities all over the world including Canada.
BC: Well, I haven’t been in Canada for quite awhile but I do read the news. The issue is very very real and very global. It’s hard to know enough if the people involved will go far enough, and I don’t mean pulling out guns and stuff, but stick to it long enough and putting pressure on to actually make any changes. But it’s certainly worthwhile. It feels good to see it happen, to see people in this thing, to having finally after…How long have we been living in globalization, like 30 years or more?
At the end of the ‘70s I was flying back from Japan, and the promoters in Japan had bought me a first class ticket. I was sitting next to this Japanese guy and we got to talking. Turns out he was a Japanese representative to the World Bank, and this was like ’78 or thereabouts. He was going on about how there was this new vision for how the world economy would work, and under this vision they would just be able to move industry to wherever it was most profitable. And I said, ‘Well, what about the work force. What are you gonna do about the people?’ ‘Oh, we’ll just move the people.’ In fact that isn’t what they did. They just abandoned the people but at that stage it was like, ‘If we need the population to move somewhere we’ll just move them.’ Never mind if they want to or not. It was very disturbing to hear this offered as his vision of the future, apparently the World Bank’s vision of the future, and yet that’s exactly where it went.
Okay, now in 2011 we have a group of Americans who’ve become numerous enough and pissed enough to actually get out in the streets and say, ‘Stop.’ But where were they for 30 years. (slight laugh) This stuff isn’t new. It’s just that Americans have been victims of it over the last decade, give or take a year or two, but it’s really this last decade where it’s come home to roost. And it’s not going to go away. I don’t think this Occupy Movement is really gonna…I’m going to stop short of saying what I was about to say but I’ll finish the thought. The thought was, I don’t think they’re going to succeed in changing much but I’ll reserve judgment on that because I feel like they might. It wouldn’t be the first time that a major popular movement, if it gets popular enough, had a positive effect on things. That’s how we got slavery banned. That’s how we got the Vietnam War ended. There’s always other factors. There’s always somebody’s loss of revenue involved. So, it has to come down to people being willing to inconvenience themselves to the point where they’re taking revenue away from somebody to get noticed, to get taken seriously enough that the ruling elements don’t feel that they can control it all with police action.
JPG: It’s interesting because things seem to move so quickly now that it may happen in this case – positive or negative – or if like any other movement, such as those against the Vietnam War; people come together but it takes years and years before there’s a result. So, it’s possible that we’ve hit a point where people will stick around for the long haul or it’s also possible that a few months down the road they’ll return to videogames and watching stuff on their iPad.
BC: I think that’s an issue. Everything does move faster now. Why? I’m not sure. I question it myself because when I think about my life as a kid or my life in the ‘60s or even the ‘70s time went slower. There was more time for everything. I don’t know if that’s just ‘cause I’m getting older and there’s a subjective change in the awareness of time or whether we are really dealing with entropy, that shit’s falling apart faster and faster. The last thing I read about the expanding universe is it’s speeding up. The universe is coming apart faster. It was expanding at the speed of light. Now, they’re saying it’s speeding up. Constantly. I don’t know what that means to you and me but it presumably means something. It may mean that time as we understand it, it actually is going faster. But whatever the reasons that it feels like that we have to move fast. Along with that sped-up time goes a short attention span and that’s been encouraged by technology and certainly by the interests that want to stay in control. There’s probably a lot of people in the corridors of power who are happy to sit there and let us try whatever we’re gonna try and let it blow over and everything will be back to quote-unquote normal again. And that’s a real problem. How long will we be able to sustain this kind of protest or this motivation to see things change?
*JPG: Well, if there’s that many people unemployed it may be, ‘Well, I’ve got nothing to do all day. I’ve made my calls and sent my resumes out, I might as well go protest down here.’ It also reminds me of when DEVO put out their album earlier this year and in the articles the members were saying, ‘See! We told you about de-evolution! We were right!’ *
BC: Right. (laughs) It’s interesting.
*JPG: For yourself, you travel around the world as a musician but also to places such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, is it a matter that you need to be hands-on and see these places of unrest in the flesh to really grasp matters rather than sit at home and read an article or a book or see a documentary? Is that necessary for you as a person as much as it is someone who takes that experience and writes a song based on that experience? *
BC: It is important to me as a person more than as a songwriter. I’m happy if I get a song out of a trip but I don’t go on the trips that I go on looking for song material. It just doesn’t work like that, but once in awhile I get lucky or I have an intense enough emotional experience in the course of one of these trips that a song has triggered, and it has happened with Afghanistan and “Each One Lost.”
Because I have the luxury of being able to be mobile…I don’t have nine-to-five hours. I have attachments, certainly, but they’re the kind of attachments that allow me that latitude, and opportunities come up to go places I feel a curiosity about that…I have an interest in military-related things that goes back to when I was kid, and a curiosity with how people deal with war, specifically. This came to me at one point when I was in Mozambique and that war had ended. I was there during it but then I was there again a year after it ended. It seemed to me like war was the natural state of humanity, that we don’t like it but we keep doing it. However complicated it gets by vested interests and political concerns et cetera, there’s something in human nature that wants to slug it out, that wants to dominate, that will keep us going to the battlefield over and over and over again. In the meantime the people who are not the instigators of these things have to survive it somehow or try to. And how do those people do it and how does it all work? I don’t have any answers about it at all. I just have an abiding curiosity about that, I suppose, because I feel like one of these days the shoe is going to fall on us, and it would be nice to know how other people have dealt with it.
JPG: I don’t want you to think that I was inferring that when you need material for a new album you purposely go to some war-torn place in the world just to get inspired. At the same time, as a songwriter you’re able to be a vehicle to personalize those experiences for the listener. A song such as “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” (the 1984 track was a result of visiting Guatemalan refugee camps) is an easy example where the anger at the situation builds up to the point that when you say the line about wanting to have a rocket launcher to shoot these oppressors, the response is, “Yes!”
BC: (slight laugh) Yeah. And in fact that isn’t the answer but, although, in the short run it sometimes is. If somebody’s coming around to kill your kids, and you have the option of defending them then you’re going to exercise that option. It’s not the Big Picture answer, that’s for sure. But it is personal. It becomes personal. All of it’s personal. We can analyze and talk in generalities and maintain distance. As journalists by and large, at least historically, I’m not supposed to do that. I’m supposed to stand back from the fray and be objective. A songwriter is under no such constraints. There’s pros and cons of both, obviously.
“If I Had A Rocket Launcher” is not reportage exactly but it sort of is because it’s reporting the experiences that I…the feeling is my experience. The things that it talks about are the experiences of people that I was talking to. But, I don’t have to be objective ‘cause it’s not my job. In fact it’s the opposite. My job is to make things personal and to make songs out of my personal take on things.
JPG: “Each One Lost” off the new album goes in a polar opposite direction as far as describing the effects of war by referencing a Ramp Ceremony held for a fallen Canadian soldier. You saw that firsthand when you visited troops in Afghanistan.
BC: It’s pain. War is pain. That’s a pretty safe generalization as well as a bunch of other stuff that it also is, but the essence of war is that. Again, it’s personal. I don’t know if I speak for the Canadian troops that I was associating with in Afghanistan or not with that song. I was hoping to, in writing it, capture the feel of that ceremony. I don’t really know if the feelings I had were totally subjective or if as I thought, and think, they were also part of what the soldiers were feeling and the Air Force people and so on, those that were there. These kids go over there and they get the shit blown out of ‘em by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and…they’re not perfect people but they felt like my kids. They’re out there. There’s all these 20 and 30-somethings out there, fighting and doing their best to do a terrible job and do it well. They are required, of course, to have the attitudes that they have towards it because, otherwise, they just couldn’t do it. You have to think it’s okay to kill people. You have to think it’s okay to kill those people, at least, the ones they’re fighting against. And there’s an element of brutalization that goes with that.
There was an interesting sidelight to this. A couple of the Canadian officers expressed to me how the world had changed since they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing. Back, not that long ago, when they recruited people they had to go to great lengths to adjust their attitudes so that killing people became an acceptable thing. Now, they don’t have to do that anymore thanks to video games. People join up ready for that kind of murder. It is slightly frightening when you think about it.
JPG: Did you see Saving Private Ryan ?
BC: Yes.
JPG: I’m thinking how in today’s warfare you could be looking through a scope and kill someone 100 to 200 yards away while there was that very powerful scene at the end of the film where the American soldier is paralyzed by fear as he watches his fellow soldier slowly killed in hand-to-hand combat a few feet away. It’s possible that now the human element is so far removed that war is more like a non-emotional video game.
BC: Yeah, and it’s not even a 100 yards away. There’s a guy watching a TV screen in Texas that’s blowing up people in Afghanistan. That’s a half a world away. Even in Afghanistan, we watched in the command center at Kandahar Airfield, it’s a whole room full of computer screens – all the screens were turned off when we walked in except for one that they left on because it wasn’t too sensitive. So, we’re watching this drone watch this guy as he drives along in his pickup truck. And then he drives up to a house and he gets out and he gets a bunch of stuff out of the back of the pickup truck and carries it into the house. This guy has no idea that he’s being watched. He doesn’t appear to. If he had a license plate, you could have read it. And this thing is high enough that he’s not aware of it. And if they wanted to they could tell that thing to fire a rocket at that house and blow it up. I don’t know where it was. It was somewhere in Afghanistan. Where? I don’t know but it was far enough away that nobody in that room was going to feel anything but a kind of video game sense of elation at having succeeded in blowing this guy up. They were following him because they thought the house that he went to was a bomb factory. You see this stuff and it’s so remote. It’s not remote when you want take territory because in order to actually take over a place you have to have people there. And that’s when we quote-unquote become vulnerable to explosive devices.
JPG: Have you had any reaction to “Each One Lost,” whether from soldiers or even your brother (His younger brother, Capt. John Cockburn, is a doctor who served in Afghanistan .) Is he still there?
BC: No, he was only there for six months. It was a standard tour that everybody gets sent on. He signed up to go back but they didn’t send him back. He did go to Haiti after that. He was in Haiti for about four months after the earthquake there. And he’s had some other interesting adventures. But, he’s now officially retired because he turned 60 in September. That’s mandatory retirement for the Canadian Army so… He’s looking at doing some stuff with the Red Cross now.
The reaction to “Each One Lost” has been pretty positive. I think it was USA Today didn’t like it. They felt like I was telling them something preachy but audiences have responded pretty warmly to it in general. You don’t know. If two-thirds of an audience claps loudly for something and the other third doesn’t, you can’t really tell. There may be people who don’t appreciate it. But, I feel like there’s so much emotional attachment to the issue because people’s kids are out there, especially in the U.S. In Canada the numbers are smaller but we’re very aware because the whole population is smaller. We notice when somebody gets killed. And we notice when our people are there in one capacity or another. As a nation, we’re a little bit less secretive than the U.S. tends to be around military issues. So, we tend to air it more clearly, a little more transparently.
I didn’t write that song to promote the war in Afghanistan. I don’t think it’s a sensible thing to be doing but the fact is there are all these people that we love there doing it. And they’re gonna come home or they’re not coming home as the case may be. Come home in one condition or another. Those of us who are old enough to remember Vietnam remember that those soldiers who came back were greeted with a great degree of unfriendliness. People were calling them, ‘Baby killers.’ The homecoming was brutal. It served no purpose for it to be like that. It would be a shame to see it happen again. It’s bad enough that the U.S., and I think this is also true in Canada, the way the Veterans Administration has shirked its responsibility for the people that come back damaged is a disgrace. That needs to be addressed. It’s getting better. At least I keep reading things that sound like it’s getting better. But it’s a problem. It’s something that Dick Cheney can be quite happy sending people off to war and just telling all of us that the world’s gonna be at war forever now. And that’s fine. It’s not going to be him. It’s not going to be his lesbian daughter that’s over there doing it. He can support gay rights and stuff like that, and he’s still an evil sonofabitch. (slight laugh) He doesn’t care if young Americans die or young Canadians die or young Afghans die or whoever. It’s business for him. So, the rest of us have to care.
JPG: Now, Small Source of Comfort is your 31st studio album. For someone who has written so much has it ever happened where you’re writing something and realize that you’re plagiarizing yourself?
BC: Yes, it’s happened rarely because I catch it before it happens. Over the years it’s become a slight problem because I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve written a bunch of songs, and I’m still the same person essentially, although I know some things now that I didn’t know back when. But a lot of the things that I feel are worth writing songs about aren’t that different from what they were at various points along the way. So, I’ll think, ‘There’s an idea for a song,’ and I’ll start to write it and then I realize I wrote it 20 years ago. So, I stop. It makes the songwriting process slower because there’s not as many new things to observe and say as there used to be. But, it still continues, which I’m grateful for.
JPG: Do you think the driving from Kingston, Ontario to Brooklyn as you were writing the album, the solitude of…I don’t know how many hours…
BC: It’s a day’s drive, eight hours or 10 hours if you hit bad traffic in New York. My girlfriend subsequently to that moved out to San Francisco. So, I’ve done that drive quite a few times now, from Kingston to San Francisco. And that affords a lot more time to…but I interrupted you.
JPG: No, that’s fine. That solitude, I love to drive because it allows the mind to wander. It seems to bring up what seems like brilliant ideas that you may or may not remember later. Does it work like that and you have a recorder on hand for anything that you come up with along the road?
BC: I’m not that technological. I write down the ideas that I get if I remember them long enough. And sometimes they just come and go. And sometimes they’re images that imprint themselves. I don’t know if this will end up in a song or not but a few months ago I was driving east across Nevada. There was a blue sky, hardly any clouds, and there was a rainbow that covered about a third of the sky. It was unbelievable. Vivid vivid…I shouldn’t say covered a third of the sky but at length it went across a big chunk of the sky. Must have been ice crystals way up high. It was so magical and beautiful, but how do you use that? I don’t know. But, it may show up.
JPG: Well, you’re the songwriter. I think you’ll figure it out. I just ask questions. Now, you drive a lot. Are you not a fan of flying?
BC: I’m not a fan of airports. I actually like flying but I hate air travel anymore. It used to be better but it’s so intrusive and such a pain in the ass to go through airports these days that I don’t do it anymore than I have to.
JPG: Kingston to Brooklyn, I can see but to San Francisco? How long does that take?
BC: Six days. I’ve done it in five but I prefer to do it in six. Long-haul truckers do it in less. I camp at truck stops when I do that. It’s fun. At this point the last couple of times I’ve come out here I’ve had to fly because of circumstances.
JPG: Back to the writing, you attended the Berklee School of Music but didn’t graduate. Your Wikipedia page gave the impression that you left because you felt you learned all you could learn there. Still, is there anything that stuck with you from those days?
BC: Yeah, I don’t think I felt like I learned all I could learn but I felt like I was in the wrong place and I needed to be somewhere else without having any real clear sense of what that somewhere else should be. I was there for a year-and-a-half. I learned a lot of things, much of it from the school courses that were being taught but also from just hanging around that many musicians 24 hours a day. In that neighborhood of Boston at the time you could walk around and you’d hear people practicing. There was music coming out of everywhere all the time. And it was a very healthy atmosphere to get started in. I don’t use the kind of harmonic techniques that I was being taught, particularly, but there’s certain principles that have stuck with me that show up in the construction of guitar parts for the songs a lot. The chord motion, contrapuntal motion, that I apply to my songs that I doubt would be the same if I hadn’t gone there.
Once the rules become part of your tool kit, basically, you don’t sit there thinking, ‘The rules say I should do this now’ but you just have them at your disposal. It’s what you think of. And, at that point it’s all very useful and informs a lot of what I’ve done over the years, especially with respect to guitar parts but not so much with the general feel of a song because that’s determined more by the lyrics. When it comes down to making the guitar fit around a melody or making the melody that the guitar suggests part of a bigger whole, it comes into play.
JPG: I read that you tried an approach of writing a song each day as a form of exercise and found that the amount of good material equaled what you got when you wrote when you just felt inclined to do it. When you’re not touring do you just decompress or do you immediately start thinking of the next recording, have a workman-like approach?
BC: Nah, I’m not so workman-like. I am when I have a particular song on the go. I get very focused. I hound it until it’s done. Right now, I’m not in a big rush to do the next thing, whatever it is.
JPG: If you do, it could be the noisy album that you originally planned for “Small Source of Comfort.”
BC: That could happen. I think it would be fun to do an album of other people’s songs, too. Which one of those will happen first, I’m not sure.
JPG: You got a little noisy on this album. I recall hearing a gong or two.
BC: There’s a lot of bells on the album and we used a lot on the tour, too. I’ve got these enormous wind chimes that I use playing solo and with the band that I had for part of the tour. It’s fun. I like the sound. At one time in the ‘70s I was in Kennebunkport, Maine and I happened to walk into this place. It was a log cabin on a little hill but it was a store that sold wind chimes. And they must have had 5,000 sets of wind chimes in this place. The building was open at both ends and the wind was blowing through so all of them were going. It was the most amazing transcendental sound…just standing there. And they’re made out of so many different materials and all different sizes and all different tunings. It was really surreal. Ever since then, I’ve had this fascination with that kind of atmosphere. Around my house, I have a lot of wind chimes that probably drive my neighbors crazy but it’s nice to stand outside and hear these things going.
