Bruce Cockburn

The people who have impressed me most – and the closest I’ve come to having heroes – are the people who have devoted their lives to making things better for others. These are people whose names you never hear, people who work for Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and other humanitarian groups. They’re just out there in the world, doing stuff.

Sometimes I catch myself doing something that I’ve already done. The more I’ve done, the more that’s likely to happen. Then I just throw it away. I wait until I’ve got the right way of getting a thing done, which means my songwriting proceeds at a very slow pace. But it’s the only way I can really work.

Music itself isn’t enough to completely wear down my stash of anger. And I don’t have all that much more to be angry about than anyone else. It’s not like I was abused as a kid or anything. I had a pretty comfortable childhood with parents who took good care of me. But resentment exists, and some of it goes into the music. Some of it goes into physical activity.

Politics is a part of life and art is about life. It doesn’t mean that all the art has to be about politics – in fact, heaven forbid. But politics is a totally legitimate area of focus for any art, whether it’s painting or songwriting or anything else, as much as sex is, as much as spirituality is, as much as any other behavior of people is.

Going to places like Honduras, Nicaragua, and various African countries you get to see very clearly what the cause and effect is. We finance the obnoxious elites in those countries and they exploit their people so we don’t have to say that we’re doing the exploiting but nevertheless we are benefiting from it.

There’s so many ways in which Canada and America are inextricably connected politically, economically, socially. There’s no stepping away. But at the same time, we don’t have a say. Canada is a different country. Sometimes I think of it as Finland in the Soviet era. We’re totally free, but we’re totally free to agree, basically. If we disagree too heartily or over too sensitive an issue, then we pay a price for that.

I’ve been accused of being a little pedantic here and there, but I don’t buy that criticism. I’m telling it like I see it. You don’t have to buy it. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to listen to it at all. I’m not trying to convince people of things, other than the fact that I’m trying to make as vivid as I can my own feelings and experiences.

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