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July 13, 2025
Winnipeg Free Press
‘Loyal friend’: Cockburn receives key to city on 50th anniversary of first folk fest appearance
Wildfire smoke forces some folkies to wear masks
By: Eva Wasney
A sprawling crowd gathered Saturday afternoon at the Winnipeg Folk Festival’s Big Bluestem stage to witness Bruce Cockburn receive the city’s highest honour.
In a brief ceremony prior to the legendary Canadian musician’s concert, Mayor Scott Gillingham presented Cockburn with the key to the City of Winnipeg.
“He has inspired and influenced countless artists, poets and entertainers; his lyrics have stirred us and soothed us and challenged us,” Gillingham said from the stage, alongside festival executive director Valerie Shantz. “Today, we celebrate Bruce Cockburn as a loyal friend of the Winnipeg Folk Festival for 50 years.”
Those in attendance gave a standing ovation and cheers of “Bruuuuuuuuce” rippled through the large daytime crowd.
Previous recipients of a key to the city include ballerina Evelyn Hart, hockey player Jonathan Toews, musician Gene Simmons, among others.
Cockburn, 80, performed at the first folk festival in 1974 and made his most recent appearance in 2017. The 13-time Juno Award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist is a member of the Order of Canada and an inductee into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
“Thank you for the recognition, thank you for the hospitality that I’ve experienced over all these years, it’s been a pretty good run,” said Cockburn, who was born in Ottawa and first travelled west in a campervan with his wife and dog in 1970.
“The people (of Winnipeg) were so hospitable and so friendly and it opened up a whole life, really, because the travel that that was the beginning of became a huge part of everything I’ve done since.”
Seated on a stool at centre-stage, Cockburn tuned his guitar and told stories between the music, which included Mama Just Wants To Barrelhouse All Night Long (a song he played at the first festival five decades ago) and Lovers in a Dangerous Time.
The crowd, one of the largest this reporter has seen at a daytime stage, was quiet and captivated during the set, standing for a second ovation once Cockburn wrapped.
The sky was sunny and smoky during the third day of folk fest.
While the air quality had improved considerably from the dense wildfire smoke hanging over grounds Friday, many festivalgoers continued to wear masks while taking in the day’s music.
Amy Attas flew in from out of town to attend the festival with family.
“I live in B.C. now and when it’s this bad, I don’t usually go outside,” she said of the smoke. “I’m wearing a mask because it feels like a good balance.”
Attas didn’t expect the festival to cancel events, but had hoped for more communication about the conditions on Friday and Saturday, when the air quality health index was hovering around 10 — the highest health risk level, during which Environment Canada recommends the cancellation of outdoor activities. The festival had put out three weather updates related to the air quality between both days.
“I don’t know if there’s anything they could do. I hope they’re protecting the performers, especially the older performers,” Attas said.
Dennis Kakoske was also visiting from out of town and expected to see fewer people and more masks.
“I thought it was really going to kill the attendance because it was so bad,” he said of the air quality. “I’m surprised that people are kind of taking it in stride… even young kids don’t have masks on.”
Kakoske also didn’t expect the event to be cancelled.
Eva, a volunteer who asked not to use her last name, decided against camping with friends at the festival when she noted the air quality Thursday night.
Photos by: Matt Horseman
May 17, 2025
Trib Live
Folk legend Bruce Cockburn gives uplifting performance at City Winery
by Alexis Papalia
Bruce Cockburn performed at City Winery Pittsburgh on May 16, 2025
Canada has produced some truly great folk singers, from Joni Mitchell to Neil Young to Gordon Lightfoot. But there’s a name that belongs on that list that isn’t as commonly known: Bruce Cockburn.
While he did have a couple of hits in the U.S. — namely “Wondering Where The Lions Are” in 1980 — and he even performed on “Saturday Night Live,” Cockburn is better known in the country to our north, where he’s enjoyed a lengthy career of writing both personal and political songs that make listeners feel and think.
And Cockburn does have plenty of fans right here. He played a lengthy show on Friday night to a packed City Winery Pittsburgh in the Strip District, with plenty of audience participation to boot.
The 79-year-old looked like a proper folk singer with his white beard as he took the stage, picking up a guitar and strumming a few forlorn notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was greeted with some chuckles and a yell of “We’re sorry, Bruce!” from someone in the crowd.
While Cockburn did venture into the political a bit, that wasn’t the main focus of the night. He growled his way through the fiery “Call It Democracy,” a cathartic tune from the 1980s about the International Monetary Fund. He also spoke about his world travels, including a trip to East and West Germany during the Cold War, before singing 1986 song “Berlin Tonight.”
“The Communist Bloc, it was starting to break up into component parts, and some of those parts were fleeing to the West without too much difficulty at that time. You could see there was some change, but nothing prepared me for the suddenness with which it actually happened,” he said.
He wrote “Berlin Tonight” after seeing a West German talk show at 5 a.m. in a hotel room, and it’s a fascinating and pensive series of lyrical snapshots about the experience of watching a period of history coming to an end. Cockburn’s voice holds an earnestness that makes you believe he just witnessed these 40-year-old events yesterday.
He also strummed out a bluesy tune called “The Soul of a Man,” originally by gospel-blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, as well as a sardonic song that he wrote in San Francisco leading up to the 2016 election called “Cafe Society.”
So much of the two-set-and-an-encore show was more uplifting, with songs about love, personal journeys and Cockburn’s Christianity. After converting as an adult, Cockburn made his journey into religion into a ribbon that’s wound its way through his discography. He closed Friday night’s show with the moving and hymn-like “When the Spirit Walks in the Room” and a farewell of “God bless you all.”
Cockburn’s voice has always been rich and expressive, but age has added a seasoned roughness that actually lends itself even better to both melancholy tunes such as “Pacing the Cage” — an ode to those moments in life when you’re feeling stagnant and need to make a change — and pure love songs such as “Push Comes to Shove.” Often, he sounded like a mix of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen.
With the exception of trading out guitars — “Quick costume change, much simpler than Taylor Swift’s,” as he remarked — Cockburn mostly kept things simple, sitting and playing onstage. At one point he did do a little “choreography” to get up and play a powerful song on the dulcimer. “To Keep the World We Know” is a song he wrote in 2023 with Inuit artist Susan Aglukark after that year’s bout of Canadian wildfires, and it is a somber but lovely call to action about climate change.
Cockburn proved that he’s also a great spoken word artist, with poetic moments in songs including “3 Al Purdys,” referencing a prolific Canadian poet. It was a song he was asked to make for a 2018 compilation album, and he wrote it in the voice of a verse-loving homeless man — a gruff character voice that he also performed with skill. And a few of his songs, including “King of the Bolero,” featured mouth trumpet solos — very proficient ones!
“Have you had enough to drink yet that you’re ready to sing?” he asked the crowd before playing “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” a jaunty and expansive tune that the crowd knew well — they sang the chorus back to him, call-and-response style. He got similar applause when he began to play “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” (fun fact: a cover of this song gave Barenaked Ladies their first Canadian hit).
With a witty stage presence, decades of intricately-crafted songs and a book’s worth of world-spanning stories, Cockburn put on a show that surely enthralled old fans and newcomers alike.
Alexis Papalia is a TribLive staff writer. She can be reached at apapalia@triblive.com.
May 8, 2025
CBC News
Music legend Bruce Cockburn added to Winnipeg Folk Fest lineup
Singer-songwriter was part of 1st festival and will now be part of the 50th
The Winnipeg Folk Festival has come full circle for its 50th edition, bringing back legendary Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn, who played at the event that started it all back in 1974.
Cockburn will take the Big Bluestem stage at 3 p.m. on July 12 at Birds Hill Provincial Park.
It's the folk icon's first time back at the fest since 2017, but he's far from a prodigal son. He's shared his music with Birds Hill crowds in 1975, 1978, 1984, 1998 and 2006 as well.
The singer-songwriter, who turns 80 later this month, is making a special detour from his tour to be part of the milestone celebration, said a news release from festival organizers.
An advocate for human rights and the environment, Cockburn uses his music to entertain while sending messages.
If a Tree Falls speaks to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, while If I Had a Rocket Launcher was inspired by a visit to a Guatemalan refugee camp in southern Mexico, where Cockburn was outraged to learn the Guatemalan dictatorship would regularly hit the camp with machine-gun fire from helicopters.
Over his five decades of performing, Cockburn has written more than 350 songs and released 34 albums.
Some of his best-known songs include Lovers in a Dangerous Time, Wondering Where the Lions Are and The Coldest Night of the Year.
In 2005, the Winnipeg Folk Festival presented him with its Artistic Achievement Award, given to an artist who has demonstrated musical excellence, reflects the values of the organization and has contributed at an exceptional level to the field of folk music and the community as a whole.
This year's festival runs from July 10 to 13, bringing a wide range of music genres, from gospel, funk and R&B to country, rock and several variations of folk.
May 6, 2025
Cleveland.com
Music legend is still learning as he nears ‘the horizon’ of mortality
by Gary Graff
Bruce Cockburn turns 80 at the end of the month -- and in songs (especially on his latest album, 2023’s critically lauded “O Sun O Moon)” and conversation he makes it clear that he’s certainly aware of that landmark.
Nevertheless, as he sings at the beginning of “O Sun O Moon,” “Time takes its toll/but in my soul/I’m on a roll.”
“It would be nice to say that know I feel like I have wisdom,” he says, “but I feel pretty much the same as I always did. I feel like I know some things, and there’s a whole lot of things I don’t know.
“There’s a certain level that comes with just having done it as much and been around as much as I have. It might be the imminent approach of death (laughs); you just sort of think, ‘What am I getting worked up about?,’ and you don’t get as worked up. I find that to be true of pretty much everything in life, but it’s certainly applicable to the whole touring scene.”
And Cockburn, who performs May 14 at the Music Box in Cleveland, can look back over his decades of making music, including 55 years since his first album, and know he’s accomplished quite a bit.
Raised in suburban Ottawa, he began playing the guitar he found in his grandmother’s attic when he was about 15 years old and also studied piano and music theory with the organist at the family’s church. Cockburn wound up at the Berklee School of Music during the mid-60s to study jazz composition, but his formal education was short-lived.
“I dropped out because even though I wanted to play music, it wasn’t that (jazz) music -- even though I love that music still,” Cockburn explains. “I never see myself as a jazz player, really. I got into writing songs, so it was a sort of relatively fast slide from being a student of big band jazz to being a songwriter in a rock band -- and at that point I stopped daydreaming about it and started just applying myself.”
Cockburn had bands -- The Children, the Esquires, the Flying Circus and Olivus -- the latter of which opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream. By 1969, however, he was a headliner as a solo performer, celebrated for his instrumental virtuosity and for songs that combined topical commentary with bold and intimate self-reflection. Cockburn released his self-titled debut album in 1970 and has put out more than two dozen since, along the way winning 13 Canadian Juno Awards.
He’s also been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Canadian Broadcast Hall of Fame, and was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1982 and an Officer 20 years later. He’s also received the prestigious Governor General’s Performing Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.
And though he’s resided in San Francisco for many years, he’s still attached to the Great White North and acknowledges feeling some “homeland insecurity” about U.S. President Donald Trump’s continuing overtures about turning Canada into a U.S. state.
“I’ve certainly been in and out of Canada recently,” Cockburn says, “but I don’t feel as nervous about Trump’s rhetoric as the people living in Canada appear to. People really take it seriously, and certainly the comparisons are obvious between (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s going on about how Ukraine is really Russia, before Russia invaded, and Trump saying the same stuff about Canada.
“That’s pretty threatening, even though we all know Trump says a lot of stuff he doesn’t mean -- sometimes I don’t think he even knows he said it. But this one he’s said a lot. He’s not dropping it. It’s threatening to people (in Canada).”
Some of Cockburn’s best-known songs explore political and social issues; his best-known songs include the anti-war screeds “Wondering Where the Lions Are” and “If I had a Rocket Launcher.” His 1984 single, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” meanwhile, was sourced by U2 for its 1988 single “God Part II” and covered by Barenaked Ladies for a 1991 Cockburn tribute album.
“O Sun O Moon” -- which Cockburn recorded in Nashville with longtime producer Colin Linden and guest contributions from Shawn Colvin, Buddy Miller, Allison Russell, Sarah Jarosz and sisters Ann and Regina McCrary -- has its outward-looking moments as well; “To Keep the World We Know” in particular addresses global warming, But more often it finds Cockburn examining more personal reasons, and for a particular reason.
“Age,” he says with a laugh. “That’s what I’m thinking about right now. I’m aware of all the stuff that’s going on around me and some of its emotional effect on me, but I’m more concerned with the horizon that’s getting ever closer. And when I step across that horizon that’s getting every closer I want to be in a good place.
“So I think about that a lot, and the songs reflect that.”
As to whether he’s at that good place yet, Cockburn says, “I’m working at it. It’s hard to measure. I don’t think I’ll know that for sure until it happens.” What he’s been gratified by, however, is the combination of a softening outlook and a strengthening resolve that’s developed, especially in his live performances.
“There’s a much greater sense of love, actually,” he notes, “and a kind of sense of solidarity with everybody. It’s the word empathy that’s been thrown around a lot lately; Elon Musk says there’s too much of it, other people say there’s not enough, but that’s one aspect of it.
“It’s more like just a real deep sense that we’re all in this Petri dish together, and I get a good feeling from that.”
Though arthritis has forced him to “relearn” some of his songs with new fingering patterns on guitar, Cockburn has future work in mind. He predicts his next album will be a covers of “a bunch of songs I like...from the ’40s and ’50s, pretty much, maybe a little ’30s in there.” He also entertains ideas of collaborative projects with other musicians -- he mentions guitarist Bill Frisell in particular -- while his own writing has been dormant of late.
But that doesn’t worry Cockburn, either.
April 16, 2025
Bruce did a live YouTube interview focusing on his 1986 album, World Of Wonders. Watch it here.
March 11, 2025
Times Colonist
Bruce Cockburn steps out, with the weight of the world upon him
by Mike Devlin
Over the course of his five-decade career, Cockburn has found other ways to be productive, with activism being one his main priorities.
AN EVENING WITH BRUCE COCKBURN
Where: Royal Theatre, 805 Broughton St., Victoria, BC
When: Tuesday, March 11, 8 p.m.
Tickets: Sold out
Bruce Cockburn is known widely for being a great interview subject, with insightful takes on a range of topics. He’s intelligent, perceptive and respectful.
But when the Times Colonist caught up with the iconic folk singer and activist last week, he was reeling. It was the day after U.S. President Trump addressed Congress for the first time, and Cockburn, a resident of San Francisco, was having none of the political hyperbole on this afternoon.
He accused Trump of exploiting the psychoanalytic “death drive” theory, which is manifested through self-destructive behaviour.
“Humankind, we live in this tension between the recognition of our inter-dependence and the need to self-destruct,” Cockburn said. “Here’s the species, tipping back and forth, saying, ‘Which way are we going to go?’ . And right now, all the weight and energy is on the side of chaos.”
Cockburn said he was taking a wait-and-see approach to the recent turn of events south of the border, but he fears the worst.
“It’s one thing to blather on like [Trump] does, and it’s another thing to actually do stuff. If it goes to the worst-case scenarios, which are fairly obvious right now, it will be a disaster for everyone on the planet.”
The 13-time Juno Award winner has outlived several threats to democracy, so he knows there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.
The member of the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement winner has made a career of writing about such things, but he does not have anything imminent to say about Trump — at least not now.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he said with a laugh.
“Sometimes things take a long time to percolate. There’s some horrifying and scary stuff going on, and some repulsive stuff going on, but the strong feelings associated with that don’t necessarily produce a song.”
Over the course of his five-decade career, Cockburn has found other ways to be productive in that regard, activism being one his main priorities. He’s lent his name and efforts to everything from Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders to Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth, and has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and degrees, including one from the University of Victoria.
He is touring across North America, with a 28-date tour that stops tonight at the Royal Theatre.
The show is sold-out, which is a common occurrence as the 79 year-old continues his career more than 60 years after it began. During that time, he has released 35 albums, the majority of which are known for their innate spirituality and musical diversity.
For all his talents, Cockburn is not the type of songwriter who writes a song immediately after seeing or hearing something impactful.
The only example he could think of was If I Had a Rocket Launcher, one of his best-known compositions, which was inspired by a 1983 humanitarian mission through South America with Oxfam.
“I spent three days in these refugee camps, and when I let it sink in, that produced a song,” he said. “The thoughts don’t necessarily coalesce into something you can present to people automatically.”
By his own admission, he’s more interested in the big picture than the details. Human interaction is where his interest lies more often than not, and he has written about love and relationships more than any other topic in his catalogue.
His pace has slowed somewhat — his latest, 2023’s O Sun O Moon, is his first vocal album since 2017, and only his third album since 2011 — but he was in a collaborative mood on the recording, which features contributions from Shawn Colvin, Allison Russell, Buddy Miller, Susan Aglukark and Colin Linden, among others.
He realized how meaningful human connection can be, especially when the world feels like it is falling to pieces.
“I live a fairly unsocial life. It’s not anti-social, but I don’t get out much and I don’t see very many people. I’m not in a music scene of any sort, and I kind of regret that in a way. I’m getting a little tired of my own company, creatively. Whenever there is a chance to work with someone else, it feels really good.”