(recording, 1979)
When his record company was promoting the release of Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws, they referred to Bruce Cockburn as “Canada’s Best-Kept Secret.” Although he was a popular, award-winning artist in his own country, he was virtually unknown outside its borders. Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws was the album that first caught the attention of the rest of the world, producing his first-ever hit single in the United States and an appearance on the popular Saturday Night Live television program. Arguably one of the best songwriters of all time, and one whose lyrics could stand alongside the best of poets, Cockburn has never found the widespread audience he deserves. For those not in on the secret, perhaps Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws is as good a place to start exploring as any other.
Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws announced a noticeable shift in Cockburn’s work. Up to this time he worked solidly within the folk genre, but this record combined a number of styles to create a sound that was upbeat, joyous, and celebratory. A largely acoustic outing, the album showcased his sparkling guitar work and some of his most poetic and imaginative songwriting. The lyrics show the influence of Charles Williams, whom Cockburn was reading at the time. Williams was a close friend of C. S. Lewis and wrote supernatural thrillers filled with strange and mystically charged moments when the spiritual world burst unexpectedly into an ordinary life. This vision of the interpenetration between this world and the next fueled Cockburn’s imagination and resulted in some of his most vivid songwriting. Cockburn described the theme of the album as “being joyful in the face of everything.”
Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws opens with the sound of acoustic guitar and marimba on “Creation Dream,” a poetic evocation of the creation and of the God who brings the world into existence with a furious, headlong dance of joy. “Hills of Morning” follows with a tripping, toe-tapping rhythm, offering a prayer of sorts, asking God to “let me be a little of your breath / moving over the face of the deep.” While it acknowledges the world’s pain and tears, it celebrates the joy of living among all the splendor of nature. So does the largely instrumental “Badlands Flashback,” with its gorgeous piano interlude. Then follows “Northern Lights,” a meditation of life as seen in the rearview mirror—haunted by memories but comforted by the awe-inspiring beauty of God’s world.
“After the Rain” is a song suggesting that the same kind of beauty and revelation found in nature can also be found in the urban world. The centerpiece of the album, and the song that helped introduce Cockburn to a wider audience, is “Wondering Where the Lions Are.” It is one of the rare songs in popular music about spiritual ecstasy and transcendence, and celebrates vanquishing the fear of death. Cockburn tells us he is “thinking about eternity” as his song bubbles over with the joy of knowing that darkness will someday be swallowed up by light. In “Incandescent Blue” Cockburn again addresses himself to God and admits his need, especially in the face of the chaos and pain of life. Darkness will not have the last word, for the last word is a word spoken from the eternal realm, a promise celebrated in the slowly building song “No Footprints,” as Cockburn returns full circle to the image of the dance, this time the eternal dance that leads us past death into the arms of God. Never denying the pain and struggles of this life, Cockburn reminds us that there are sources of strength and joy that come from beyond this broken world.
Bruce Cockburn was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1945, and spent his earliest years on the family farm, where he got his first taste for the beauty of the natural world. The young Cockburn discovered a guitar in his grandmother’s attic, which he dusted off and adorned with golden stars, and used to play along with his favorite music on the radio. His father would only allow him to take guitar lessons if he promised not to buy a leather jacket, something the elder Cockburn clearly saw as an emblem of rebelliousness. The young Cockburn enthusiastically agreed, but his rebel spirit could not be contained for long. He became a devotee of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat writers. Although he attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, he only lasted about three semesters, as he was more interested in what he was learning about music outside classes than inside them, absorbing the music scene and participating in a succession of bands where he honed his skills with the guitar and with songwriting.
In 1969 Cockburn decided to try his hand as a solo artist and released his self-titled solo album the following year. It showcased his acoustic guitar playing and its breathtakingly complex, intricate gracefulness. It also served notice that a talented songwriter had arrived. Bruce Cockburn (1970) and the albums that followed gave evidence of his great love of the natural world and his interest in spirituality. He was, he later said, “a spiritual loner who found truth in nature.” But more and more, Christian symbolism began to make its way into his songs, culminating into full expression on Salt, Sun, and Time (1974) with the song “All the Diamonds in the World,” which he wrote the night he committed his life to Jesus. For Cockburn, who was raised an agnostic, it had been a slow path toward an embrace of Christianity, influenced by reading the books of C. S. Lewis and Thomas Merton and by a mystical experience he had of God’s presence with him as he stood before the altar during the exchange of his wedding vows.
Cockburn’s faith was very much in evidence in his albums from that time forward. The title track of Joy Will Find a Way (1975) was a celebration and anticipation of life after death, and “Lord of the Starfields” from In the Falling Dark (1976) was a hymn-like song of praise uncharacteristically straightforward in its lyrical expression of Christian theology. In the years that followed his references to faith were generally more oblique, but it was a consistent theme throughout his oeuvre.
After Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws, Cockburn went through a difficult divorce, and his subsequent album, Humans (1980), which is every bit the masterpiece as its predecessor, has a much darker and more melancholy tone. Here faith is expressed in the context of the struggles of life and its disappointments. There is a sting of pain that accents every song, though a message of hope emerges out of the darkness, especially in “More/Not More,” “Fascist Architecture,” and “The Rose Above the Sky.” This album also contains one of his finest expressions of how the glories of nature and the mysteries of relationships provide us with hints about the ultimate meaning of life in “Rumours of Glory.”
Following his divorce, Cockburn moved from the Ottawa countryside to urban Toronto, and his albums began to show his growing concern for social and political causes. These take center stage with The Trouble With Normal (1983); the title song reminds the listener that the status quo usually devolves into a system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The trouble with normal, he suggests, “is it always gets worse.” Cockburn began to travel widely, often to third-world countries. His recent autobiography, Rumours of Glory, shows how much his songs have been influenced by what he read, where he traveled, and some of the horrors he witnessed. These experiences began to show themselves in songs that raised a voice against injustices and atrocities. “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” one of his most popular songs, records the depth of his helpless anger on witnessing a Guatemalan refugee camp being strafed by military helicopters. He also penned songs about the plight of Nicaragua, the war in Iraq, the problem of land mines, and environmentalist concerns.
Cockburn’s passionate and intense lyrics have an almost prophetic tone of denunciation against purveyors of violence and greed and the human suffering they cause. He distrusted the optimistic modern myths about human progress, as he saw their effect on people—the hardness of heart that allows us to turn our eyes away from the results of our actions. There is an anger in Cockburn’s lyrics that sometimes bursts forth in an expletive, which some listeners might find offensive. These occasional outbursts, though, cannot be classified as coarseness for its own sake or an attempt to be cute or hip. They are an articulation of the gut-wrenching realities he has seen, and these provoke an outrage for which there are no polite words. It is the fury that comes from empathizing with the pain of others, and should cause us to engage ourselves with finding solutions. We must, his lyrics remind us, “kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.” More pronounced than the anger that rises to the surface in his songs is his compassion for the victims and the downtrodden. There is always an accompanying message of hope that a brighter, more just world is possible if we would really follow the path of love.
Cockburn became increasingly reluctant about identifying himself with evangelical Christianity, rejecting outright its conservative politics and moralism. His song “The Gospel of Bondage” is a strong indictment against the wedding of the status quo with a triumphal Christianity. Instead, in songs such as “Shipwrecked at the Stable Door” he reminded listeners that Christ was on the side of the victims, the losers in political gamesmanship, and the morally bankrupt who recognize their need for grace. In a 1999 interview he explained what being a Christian meant to him:
The word Christian is a little problematic now, I think, because it’s so loaded. I’m not sure what I even mean by it anymore, never mind what anybody else means. But I consider myself to be in an ongoing, developing relationship with God. That relationship is central to my life, and I believe it is the most important thing in my life.1
Bruce Cockburn’s catalog of songs is a kind of musical diary that artistically expresses the complexity of his vision of the world—at once joyful and crowded with “rumors of glory,” while also broken and filled with pain and suffering. Above all else, he sees this as a “world of wonders,” and continues to offer songs that remind us that the glory of God is all about us, a mystery that should energize us toward love for each other. Ultimately, Cockburn asserts, all of us in this broken world are “waiting for a miracle.”
And the best-kept secret is a secret no longer.