PEL Presents NEM#262: Bruce Cockburn Expands Political/Spiritual Folk

Introduction to Bruce Cockburn

0:00You're listening to Nakedly Examined Music, a podcast about songs and songwriters. My name is Mark Linsenmeyer. My guest for episode 262 is Bruce Coburn. He's a Canadian singer-songwriter, very proficient and innovative guitarist, known especially for his political songs, his activism, including the song you're hearing now, perhaps his biggest, most remembered single in the U.S.,

0:32If I Had a Rocket Launcher, from his 1984 album Stealing Fire. He spent a little time being the lead guitarist in rock bands in the late 60s, but quickly determined that he would rather be a solo artist. His first and self-titled album was released in 1970 with just him and his guitar. guitar. He's now released his 34th album, The Blood of Others, going back to just him and his guitar, although this time it's an album of all cover tunes. We will be discussing his interpretation of Lewis Collins, a song originally by Mississippi John Hurt from 1928. Then we're

1:09going to look to his 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu, and discuss the song Look How Far. Then we'll look all the way back to his second album, 1971's High Winds, White Sky, and discuss Let's Go Laughing. We'll conclude by listening to Cafe Society, a track from his 2017 album Bone on Bone. Learn more at brucecoburn.com. That's Coburn spelled cockburn. And I will also recommend his memoir, Rumors of Glory, that I drew on heavily for this episode. To learn more about this

1:44podcast, see NakedlyExaminedMusic.com or get your experience ad-free at Patreon.com slash Nakedly Examined Music.

Musical arc and radio airplay

1:53If I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate.

2:03So I will play a little bit of If I Had a Rocket Launcher from Stealing Fire from 1984. Usually I sort of play the biggest hit, but you have too many. This is just the one that I knew from when I was a kid, but I understand wondering where the lions are, which is slightly before my time, was maybe a bigger initial radio thing. I don't know, your sound is so constantly moving. I did read your autobiography in prep for this, so I kind of got to see how, well, okay, you were big in Canada, and it's just a matter of, you know, breaking in steadily to the U.S. I guess before we get to the new thing, do you want to say anything about that lengthy arc from the 80s to here?

2:38What I'm thinking is, as you're telling me all this, is that you're kind of the man who knew too much. When I started out, I wasn't thinking that I would ever get on the radio. I just wanted to make records of my songs. I was operating in a kind of, for want of a better way of putting it, the folk world. The folk records didn't get on the radio in 1970, generally. I mean, there were some crossover things that did, but not many. By that time, in the decade earlier, there had been some. So I didn't start out with, you know, thinking of career or anything. It was just, I don't know

3:10either. It's just, people use the language, and I've been around it for long enough that it pops up sometimes, but it's always been one album at a time, and no assumption that there'll ever be another one. You know, it's been going on like that for almost 60 years. There definitely is an arc. I mean, in terms of public visibility, you can see it grow in Canada through the 70s. It's very limited attention from the US, but a little bit along the border and a couple of other pockets. By the end of the 70s, Wonderland Alliance came out, and that got on the radio

3:41all over the place. So all of a sudden, you know, I had a much bigger audience and much greater touring scope. Things got a lot busier. It remained that way, but in terms of radio and that kind of attention, it kind of peaked in the late 80s, I would, and then into the 90s. As long as there was a, with the AAA format on radio was very good to me in the US. Canadian radio was always kind of in the picture to some extent with the kind of departure from the scene of the

4:13AAA format. My records don't see the light of day on radio much these days, but I mean, they do on the CBC in Canada, but otherwise quite a bit more limited than it used to be. But, you know, I'm still doing a lot of shows and people are coming out to them. So that side of things continues in a very healthy way. Well, and it's great to see that the pace at which you put things out, which was, you know, very rapid for quite a long time, was not determined seemingly at all by, oh, they were giving me the

4:45money and now they're not giving me the money. Well, you made a bunch of records before they were giving you the money. So it's okay. You know, you just keep it. I'm still making them know when they're not giving me money.

Roots in Mississippi John Hurt

4:52Yes. Yes. Where there is no, there is no money anymore. Let's turn to the current thing, right? This is a songwriting podcast. So it's a little unfortunate that I caught you at the moment where the thing that we're promoting is not original material, but it seems like the one you picked in particular, Lewis Collins, originally by Mississippi John Hurt, 1928, it seemed like this is the kind of thing that was foundational to your finger picking style in the first place. Like, was this a song you knew from when you were picking that up in the sixties? Yes, very much so. About half the album could be described that way. Mississippi John was a major

5:25influence on the right hand part of my guitar playing. I never could quite get things to work the way he did, but in the attempt, I learned a lot and, you know, learned ways to use my thumb and fingers that are, that owe a lot to him and others. But, you know, Brownie McGee, I would say too, and Bill Brunzi, the other, you know, very, and Matt Slipscomb, other people in that kind of genre that loosely love Mississippi John. But I was also studying jazz composition and that got in there

5:57too. And, and I always wanted to play rock and roll. So that got in there too. And what I do now is a hodgepodge. And in terms of that song, Lewis Collins, when the album comes out, people will be able to see the liner notes. And I described the first time I heard that song, a friend had invited me over to her house. I think it was probably a Sunday, a weekend afternoon anyway, you know, and we just sat on the living room floor and she opened up a bottle of Menteuse wine and which I had never drunk before. I think I was probably 17, this is going on. And, you know, we sat there and

6:28we drank wine and listened to Mississippi John Hurt. And it was the album that he made first upon his kind of return to performing after a long hiatus as a farmer between his youth and, and his old age. And it was just shockingly great the way he played and sang and the way the, the kind of phrasing he used and the way he tended to play the melody along with his voice. There's a kind of alternating bass, some part, but he's kind of playing the melody of the song as he sings it. And, and that was

6:59like, I kind of, wow, this is so effective. I started doing something similar, but then, you know, I had the benefit or not of all this other education and, and that got in there. So it pretty soon stopped being just a melody. I was adding harmony parts on the guitar and, but you know, it had, that song would have had to be on this album because it was so seminal for me.

Lewis Collins performance

7:29Mrs. Collins weepers is calling small to see her son who is leaving home. Angels laid him away. Angels laid him away. Angels laid him away. They laid him six feet under the clay. Angels laid him away.

8:16Bob shot one and Lewis shot two. Shot poor Colin shot him through and through. Angels laid him away. Angels laid him away. Angels laid him away. Angels laid him away. They laid him six feet under the clay. Angels laid him away.

8:47When they heard that Lewis was dead. When they heard that Lewis was dead. When they heard that Lewis was dead. When they heard that Lewis was dead. All the people they dressed in red. Angels laid him away. Angels laid him away. Angels laid him away. They laid him six feet under the clay

9:17Angels laid him away guitar solo Colin's friends cried, oh, waited hard To see poor Lewis in that new graveyard

9:51Angels laid him away Angels laid him away They laid him six feet under the clay Angels laid him away Angels laid him away They laid him six feet under the clay

10:25Angels laid him away

Fingerpicking style and guitar changes

10:29Beautiful little riff there. I actually hadn't heard the original until yesterday. He played it live a bunch of times. So I'm not sure if I was listening to the same version, what is sort of identified by Spotify as the master or whatever the original recording. But it seems like what you're doing is a little trickier. You're you're following his strategy. But you like were you learning this kind of figure picking from him in this recording or you are you already were doing this more or less. And this sort of just gave you another tool.

11:02Well, I was learning as best I could from the recording. There are a lot of other things went into it. When I first heard this, I was still in high school. I went to music school for a couple of years after that. I was living in Boston in the 60s. The folk scene was I was studying jazz composition, as I mentioned, but I was surrounded by a very vibrant folk scene, including a lot of people like the Jim Quest and Jug Band and others that whose records I had.

But there they were, like I could go see them do an open mic session at Club 47 or whatever. I did that a lot. And a lot of great people came through those clubs that were very accessible to me. I got pointers then. And of course, you'd go to those shows and then you meet other people that were interested in the same music and that also might play guitar. So I had a lot of people show me different things. I mean, some of them, I don't even remember their names. If I even knew their names, it's just like, how'd you do that?

You know, and then they show you how I did it.

11:57And I mean, it was an interesting, not everybody wanted to show you how they did it. There was one guy who used to play at the open mic sessions. He put a handkerchief over his left hand so nobody could see what he was doing. And he had this sort of proprietary attitude toward his not really brilliant guitar rips. But there was a lot of just a, it was a very, a time full of ferment and a lot of sharing of energy and information. So is this one that you had played on and off through the years so that it evolved in your own hands a little bit? Or were you going back to it, rediscovering it, maybe re-listening to that original recording to figure out this version in particular?

12:35No, actually, it's, it's more like the former, right? I mean, I've been playing it over the years. And I play it to myself in soundchecks and whatever. Occasionally in a folk festival workshop where you have to do somebody else's songs, it would show up. I learned it in C fingering, which I think is what he does. It's been a while since I've actually listened to the original version. Now, my fingers are getting a bit arthritic and there's certain moves they don't make now. Certain chord formations that are very difficult and to make sound good. I can still get them, but they, the strings rattle and all that.

13:07So I had to change the fingering for that song because it was in the C fingering, which I have a problem with. And I moved it to a D fingering, which, I mean, like I said, guitar players will get that and nobody else will, but, but whatever. I had to change the way I played it. I kept the basic intention, but the D fingering allowed me to kind of add a little bit more harmony to the guitar part. So I'm not just playing the melody all the time. It's come. I'm also harmonizing the melody, which is a bit different from what Mississippi John did, but the essence is pretty similar.

13:42Were you playing with drop D? Yeah, actually double drop D, which is two outside strings are tuned to D. Oh, wow. Also seems like lyrically, just this sort of reporting, right? I was doing research on this, that this is based on a real event from 1897, an actual killing of a guy named Lewis Collins by somebody named Bob Kent. I don't know if much more is known about that. I mean, did you even know that? Actually, no, I did. I knew that it was based on something that, or at least it appears to have been based on something that actually happened in Memphis, if I'm not mistaken. But no, I didn't. I mean, the names are in the song.

14:17Bob shot one, and Lewis shot two, and there were apparently two assailants. Or else Lewis was in a gunfight. I'm not sure how to interpret those two lines. Okay, that's interesting that you haven't even resolved it. That's great. Lewis would have been trying to defend himself. I don't know. But anyway, he lost. The song is a kind of little tragedy, as are many of the songs on this record, actually. So is it a stretch to say that this falls in the category of the sort of reporting song that you are very, very well known for, right? That what Rocket Launcher has had the endurance it has, not because it has a nice 1984 synth part on it, but because it was this description of this actual event that you were going, and your tone of this sort of citizen reporter, musician reporter. Seems like this is what's happening here a little bit.

15:08Yeah, I've written a lot of songs with that perspective over the years. And I haven't even thought about it with respect to Lewis Collins, but it is that, absolutely. I don't think, I mean, I think it's pretty safe to assume Mississippi John was not present for that event and was just telling the story. But, or, I mean, he's credited, as far as I know, with writing the song, but he may not have. Back in that era, people weren't as careful about documenting such things, especially in the folky world. So I don't really know more about the origin of the song, other than that he's the only person of that generation that I heard do it.

15:46One of the reasons I was asking whether you've been playing this consistently is because I sort of would expect when you play something again and again, given how exploratory your fingers tend to be in coming up with new guitar things, that there would be an instrumental break, that it would do something. But it seems like it stayed very contained and, you know, it's pretty repetitious, right? The angels take them away, that we're just, that there's something sacred about that particular format. Well, it's pretty traditional, you know, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus. And the recurrence of the chorus invites listeners to sing along because it becomes familiar quickly. So, you know, you're hearing the verses and then they're punctuated with this chorus that, you know, makes it sound like Lewis Collins is probably a pretty good guy.

16:33But we don't know that. From a musical point of view, it invites people to, if not overtly participate, at least kind of in their heads. The familiar refrain, you know, acts as a kind of setup for the next verse and a kind of release from the previous verse. And it is a very traditional structure, you know, thousands of English ballads that are composed that way, for instance. I thought I detected an overdub or two somewhere on the album and listening through the whole thing. But for the most part, right, this is just supposed to be your solo live show, the covers portion of it, or, you know, this education.

17:09Yeah. Any thought about just sort of the ethic of doing this kind of album, very minimalist now, as compared to what you've done very, very recently? The idea, in my mind, was to create something that just felt like me sitting on your couch playing songs at you. And I think we kind of caught that. There are other bits and pieces besides me on the record. Victor Krauss plays bass on a few of the songs. And Colin Linden added some guitar. Janice Powers plays a tiny organ part in one of the songs. But it's really, as you said, pretty minimalist. And that was by design, because I wanted it to feel kind of intimate. It's the way I feel about those songs.

17:49I mean, they're not songs that need me to promote them in the world. It's not like my own songs, where if I don't sing, nobody will ever hear them. These songs are out there. But what I can bring to it is my own feeling about those songs. And sharing my feeling about music is part of the fun of performing in the first place and intended to feel intimate in that way.

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Look How Far background

19:48Your music, your earnings. So, again, that album is The Blood of Others. It should be out by the time this interview comes out. Let's get the second song out there, going back a little bit to still a mature period. In 1999, the album was Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu. The song you picked was Look How Far. Do you want to say a few things about it before we play it in full and talk more? Yeah, the phrase, Look How Far the Light Came, came from something, and I don't remember what it was. I had read it somewhere, not in a song, but in a poetic context, just something.

20:23I don't remember if it was a scientific article or if it was, you know, somebody's opinion about something. But the phrase stuck with me, and it just seemed like a beautiful concept to put someone in. And I was really thinking of Ani DeFranco when I wrote it. You know, I hadn't seen her for a long time, but we were friendly. Never went much beyond friendly, but we ran into each other every now and then. And she's the subject of an earlier song called Birmingham Shadows, just that is a piece of reporting about us going for a walk in the middle of the night in Birmingham, Alabama.

20:56Look How Far the Light Came. I just, I don't really remember what I was thinking exactly, but I picked it out of the song when you asked for some titles because I really liked that song and I kind of wanted to throw it out there and get it some attention. Let's get started.

Look How Far performance

21:39On this rooftop, where we're sitting In the rays of the setting sun Glasses of wine Glasses of wine On a crate between us Catch the light

22:13Seem to glow from within And there's a laugh Hanging in the air And there's no desperation anywhere So many miles

22:59So many doors Some need patience Some need force All fall open In their own due course To allow us This time And you're living in light

23:34And you're living in light Golden and thin Looks to me Like you're lit up from within And you're living in light Look how far

24:05Look how far the light came to paint you this way.

24:35And I picture us. In this light, friendship a fine silver web, stretched across a golden smoky haze, and this is simple, and this is grace.

25:33And this light is best from far away, passing through the last whisper of day. And look how far the light came. Look how far the light came.

26:08Look how far the light came to paint you this way. I basically invented us sitting on the rooftop in the setting sun.

Grace and evening light

26:42I mean, it was equivalent to other encounters we'd had, but in my imagination, we're sitting there on a rooftop with a crate, you know, and glasses of wine sitting there, and it's evening. I've always been a big fan of the way sunlight hits the planet in the evening. It does a similar thing in the morning sometimes, but not in San Francisco, where I live now. It's always foggy in the morning. But that sideways light that comes in, and it gets golden because it's going through more of the atmosphere, etc.

27:12There's a beauty in that pretty much every day to put somebody that you feel affectionate toward in a setting with that light, produce a kind of sense of the magic of that kind of setting. Well, yeah, it seems like it's a still painting for most of it, just a slow, meditative, with this hypnotic, repetitive pattern that you've got going with just a little, you know, very subtle arrangement things and things coming in and out. And most of it is just, you know, describing the beauty of the scene. I mean, that you add a sort of love, look how far the light came to paint you.

27:47So, you know, it's got a little implicit love song in there. But then there's a little musing that you can't help, that, okay, we're in this meditative mood, so we'll talk about friendship, a fine silver web, stretch across a golden smoky haze. And this is simple, and this is grace, which, having just read your book, you know, this is not the kind of tone one would expect. It's not a Christian rock song, but just your emphasis on grace, mystical exploration, whatever, comes in so many flavors. And, you know, you shouldn't let anybody's dogma make you express it in a certain way.

28:18And so, any song can basically be a prayer. You know, a lot of things are prayers, and sometimes they're prayers we don't intend, you know, and sometimes we might even regret. I mean, you could be praying to the wrong thing for the wrong thing. But, yeah, I think I feel like grace is everywhere. The fact that I noticed that has been one of the greatest manifestations of that grace. It's been a huge blessing for a lot of my life. It's not 24-7. There's lots of times when I get grumpy and I don't notice it, but it's always there.

28:52And once in a while, you either imagine or you find yourself in a setting where it becomes very evident. Sometimes it's in a setting with a person like this song talks about. Other times, you might be standing under a night sky and looking up at the stars and overwhelmed by a feeling of connection to the whole cosmos. I mean, many of us have experienced that, you know, and that and everything in between. It can show up anywhere, anytime, and sometimes in terrible surroundings, although my life has been spared that. But you read accounts of people in concentration camps, people in other kinds of terrible difficulties, and sometimes they notice that grace there.

29:31And sometimes it's made manifest in people's lives. Given your corpus and what you often write about, having the line, and there's no desperation anywhere. Like, normally, if you're just describing a peaceful scene, drinking, you don't have to point out the negative. Oh, and there's not a concentration camp next to us, and there's not smog filled. But, you know, it's very in keeping with your, that this is calling attention to, maybe this, you know, this is a breath within this. It's basically the message of wanting where the lines are, for instance, right?

30:04Like, where, it's like, you know, there's, all this stuff's going on. Some of it, there's some pollution, there's some other stuff, and there's some soldiers. The darkness of that is at a distance in that song. And in this song, it's at a greater distance, really. But, yeah, you know, the crap is out there. It can show up any time, too, just like grace shows up any time. Look How Far the Light Came is a kind of celebration of that sense of grace. But there's other songs that I've written that are more about the absence of it, or the question, where is it now?

30:36So, where does the, some need patience, some need force, all fall open in their own due course? Because it's not like, yes, there are many avenues and opportunities for grace, but it's not like everybody fall, what is the falling open here? These are choices that confront us, or gifts that we may or may not recognize, and therefore, you know, if we don't recognize them, we're not going to make use of them. You know, and sometimes you'll wait around for a door to open, and it takes patience because it's not happening the way you want it to.

31:09And sometimes the doors, you do have to force your way through it, but it's really about accepting the fact that we're offered choices and then trying to make the right one. All right. I'm not sure why I was reading, some human beings need patience. That's clearly, you're matching what's written there. We all need a lot of patience, that's for sure. So, yeah, talk about this ensemble. Let's hear how it starts off, that it's, right, you just start with your chordal pattern, and then we just layer one little thing on top of it, a little more percussion.

31:42Oh, now a full drum kit, now bass. Any thought about just this choice of production here? It's pretty organic. We had the band in the studio, and we played the song, and that's the recording. I do overdubs in this case, as you talked about, the 20 guitar solo and stuff like that.

32:17It's me in the rhythm section at the very minimum playing, and in this case, it was Ben Reilly and Steve Lucas playing drums and bass, respectively. We'll play the song over Goleman, who produced the album, and as he has on many last albums, would have suggestions. And I don't remember specifically with this song what role each of us played in terms of determining which way it went. But my approach has always been to just get really good people to play with me and then let them do what they want.

32:48And then I act as editor. So if they're going a little bit overboard with something or taking it in any direction that isn't how I hear it, I'll say so, and they'll adjust. But most of the time, the parts that people come up with are their own. And it's because I like the fact that people will bring the way they hear the music to the performance. So that's the kind of basic way we start doing pretty much all the records. Sure. I mean, this does sound quite edited in that, like, just a very deliberate, like, each chorus, we're going to have a little more stuff.

33:22Or there's harmony vocals in all of them, but they're doing something slightly different in each one, maybe more prominent as the song goes on, just to have a very deliberate growth. A lot of that is done in the mix. You know, that'll be, because those things are done as overdubs, you bring in singers, and they're going to sing to what you've already recorded. The same way if I overdub a guitar part, I'm doing the same thing. So what you choose to do then is determined to some extent by what's already there. We played with it a bit to find the right parts, to find, but Colin, I actually, as I'm thinking back, Colin had an idea where he thought the vocals should go.

34:00So, you know, that's where we started with his idea about that. And, you know, he would just say, okay, let's go to this chorus and do this. But, you know, you want people to understand the context of what they're singing, so you make a point of making sure that they know what the whole song is about. Well, yeah, as you emphasize in your book, that it seems like, especially at this stage of your career, where you were more produced than the stuff pre-90s in a certain way, that you might have had several different harmony vocalists come on and, you know, it's very carefully chosen.

34:32Like, I just really like how her voice sits with yours in the last chorus, that it has a certain intimacy and the, you know, we didn't really talk about with regard to Lewis Collins, sort of the evolution of your voice over time. That, as we'll hear pretty soon, young Bruce, you know, has this nice smooth, and here it's still very smooth, but you're, there's a lot of talk singing on this album, like on many of the songs, for parts of it. Then here you go, you know, you sing the, in the chorus, and now, you know, with the later stuff, I read an interview with, like, Bob Dylan rejoices in what age and time have done to his voice.

35:09He just loves the fact that he sounds like this. Yeah, what is your, your own attitude towards your own voice as it's been progressing? I always thought I sounded so wimpy back in the day, and I don't think so now. I mean, that's for someone else to judge, really, but for my own feeling, it's, I always wished I had a bit more grit in my voice in the 70s, but I didn't. It was just what it was, and I worked with what I had. But over time, with the consumption of copious amounts of whiskey and other things, it's got better.

35:39It's got, it's developed a character that it didn't have before. You're always dealing with limitations. I mean, any, pretty much any human endeavor, you're always dealing with limitations. But as a musician, you're limited by your technical chops. You're limited by the voice that you came into the world with and what you can make of it, and by your own imagination. And so you, everything, all creative work is kind of, involves a confrontation with those limitations and the requirement to either sidestep them, overcome them, or just live with them.

36:13Has your range shrunk a lot, such that you just have to do things at different keys than you used to and all this, you know, the normal? Not much, a little bit. Actually, my voice has gotten better in the last decade, even. I can't sing as high as I used to in my 20s, is all I'm saying. I'm not certain this is true, but I don't feel like I've lost anything at the top end, as long as I'm warmed up. If I don't sing for a week and then I, you know, start playing a song, there's definitely accumulation of rest. But once I'm warmed up and in shape, I can pretty much get all the notes I need to.

36:48Okay, so that's, it's probably a completely separate issue from the choice to do this much talk singing. It seems like it's more about the evolution of your lyrics, and this is not even that typical of them, because I see some of the spoken word pieces as, well, I'm writing more poetically and it's a little harder. But here, they're delivered so slowly on this rooftop, where we're all set, you know, that it's more about, you know, you could have sung some melody, like it was not, you know, because you had too many words or something. Yeah, the songs always start with lyrics. Some lyrics want a melody and some don't.

37:24I was experimenting a lot in that era with open word stuff, because I just felt like it was kind of fun to explore potential reaches of this, of what constitutes a song. I mean, I've always loved poetry and you can listen to, for instance, Dylan Thomas reading his poetry. It's available on record and he sounds like music, just talking by, with his Welsh accent and it's incredibly musical. And you think, okay, that's one end of a certain spectrum and then Bach chorale or some other kind of vocal thing from the classical world would be at the other end of the spectrum.

38:03And I'm somewhere in between where I don't have the musical sounding voice of someone like Dylan Thomas or of any number of great singers. Joe Stafford, whose hits was also on this album, people who have an incredible purity of voice. I'm never going to have that. You just look for ways to use the ideas. And sometimes when I say the ideas just want to be spoken rather than song. I mean, there's a song, an older one from the mid 80s, actually written probably in the earlier part of the 80s called Hoop Dancer, which was the first real attempt at a spoken word piece.

38:39I don't know if there's any singing in it, actually. There's a kind of rhythmic chanting. That's one I haven't listened to for a long time either. But it just seemed like, well, you know, why not? I mean, one of my major influences as a writer was collectively speaking, the beat generation. As you're saying this, I'm thinking of Allen Ginsberg, that I was introduced to Allen Ginsberg by somebody giving me like the complete set of his poems. So I'm sorry, the CDs of his recorded him reading his poems. So like, I don't really read poetry ever, but I was really struck by that in particular.

39:13You know, this his delivery of his stuff and which you don't get. There's not a lot of ranting in your spoken word stuff. It does seem to err on the side of smooth and relaxed. Like you still play with intonation a little bit, but it seems, you know, keeps to the singing volume from from what I recall. Unless there's a missing punk album that I'm not thinking of. Yeah, I think I think that's fair. Where I was going with the idea was the beats on numerous occasions. You'd have somebody reciting or reading poetry with a jazz band playing in the background.

39:43The words and the music would interact in a very different way from how we think of songs, but they would interact. So it seemed to me like it was a fun idea to kind of see what I could do with the same concept. That's part of what went into the spoken word stuff. But I mean, there's still songs that kind of sound like that, the more recent ones, but I did a lot of it. I haven't felt the need to keep doing that, but I wouldn't rule it out either if the right idea came along.

Let Us Go Laughing and Canadian nature

40:10All right.

Let Us Go Laughing and Canadian nature

40:11Let's go way back to 1971 here. High Winds, White Sky was the album. Let's Go Laughing was the song you picked. You wrote about this in your book. You were saying your right hand technique was driven by the blues, like the one we heard at the beginning, but that your left hand was infected by the music school stuff. And clearly, as you also mentioned in the book, you had been reading poetry and influenced by poetry in a way that I don't know that that many young people are. At least I didn't know any, but maybe it's just a different generation.

40:41These are very, quote unquote, poetical lyrics, in some ways, kind of a similar to what was just going on in the last song we just discussed. But that is so much more natural and painterly. And this, this scene, it just, you know, it's definitely a younger person. Do you want to say a few things about this before we hear it? Yeah. And it struck me as that this wasn't intentional, but they're both kind of evening songs. There's a landscape factor in the lyrics and it's evening. But in the case of Let Us Go Laughing, it's I'm in a canoe on a lake.

41:12And I did a lot of that as a kid at summer camp and then much less so as an adult. But the canoe as a point of access to the natural world was really important to me. There were lots of things I didn't like about being at summer camp, but I did like being out in the bush. There's no place you can go in Ontario, really, that, well, there's no place I've been where you don't see evidence of people having been there before you. But it's a formerly logged landscape that's grown up in forest, you know, for the last hundred years or thereabouts.

41:45And so the trees are big and big enough. And it's the kind of terrain that would be called the Canadian Shield. It's a very, very old rock and the soil is pretty thin and it was heavily glaciated. So it's scoured, there's thousands of lakes and the rocks have been scoured over. And then this thin kind of almost a veneer of forest growing up on top of that. But all those lakes, many of them are connected and you can paddle from one to the other and travel quite long distances. Sometimes without even getting out of the canoe, most of the time there are portages that you run across if you're paddling all day somewhere.

42:21So anyway, that's just background. Canoe had a kind of importance to my sense of what it is to be in the world.

Let Us Go Laughing performance

42:28My canoe lies on the water Evening holds the bones of day The sun, like gold dust, slips away

43:11One by one, antique stars Herald the arrival of Their pale protectress moon

43:47Ragged branches vibrate Strummed by winds from over the hill Singing tales of ancient days

44:20Singing tales of ancient days Far and silent lightning Stirring Stirring the cauldron of the sky Stirring the cauldron of the sky Stirring the cauldron of the sky I turn my bow toward the shore

44:56Toward the shore

45:26Water, water and dry Water and water Water the shore Water, water and water Water, water and water Thank you.

46:26Thank you.

46:56Let us go laughing, oh, let us go. And may the holy hermit's staff on and on and on Guide you to the shortest path on and on for many a year And let us go laughing, oh, let us go.

47:27Let us go laughing, oh, let us go. Was this again in drop D or drop double D or something? It sounded like they were... Actually, yes, it's in drop D. Okay. Just single drop D. It's still minimalist. Well, I mean, you hadn't gotten to the point where you were, you know, working with producers

47:58who were adding lots of stuff. Well, I guess it sort of fits and starts, right? There was an album even before this. My intention with the first album was to have nothing but me. This is part of what appealed to Bernie Finkelstein, who wanted to start a record company, that it was going to be a cheap album. He didn't have to come up with very much money to get it. I wanted to make an album like the albums I loved, like a Mississippi John Hurt album, which was just him and his guitar. And Gene Martin, who produced the album, is a widely educated, deep into electronic music

48:31more so now than at that time. But he was getting into it back then. So there was always this little bit of... We'd have kind of creative discussions. There was never any difficulties associated with this. But he would come up with ideas, like, let's put a little bit of this in there. And even on the first album, there's some kind of... I don't remember how we did it. Back then, synthesizers were a thing that looked like a laptop or a desktop, actually, and you put pins and holes to make sounds.

49:01He had one of those. This song doesn't have that. But Gene was always looking for opportunities to kind of present that kind of idea. Yeah. On this one, we just have the one... Is it a second guitar or a dulcimer or something? Something that is echoing you and just, you know, filling out a few spots? Yeah. What was it? It was Eric Nagler playing something mandolin-like. It was not double strings like a mandolin, as I recall, but sort of a small, lute-shaped instrument with steel strings that has a beautiful sound. I can't remember what it was called, actually.

49:34It probably says it in the liner notes. But yeah, Eric was a friend at the time. A mandolin banjo, says the internet. Yeah, but it's not double strings. As you can hear, it doesn't have that particular quality. But it's a pretty sounding thing. I'm pretty sure we just played it together, so I did the first part. This is sort of two songs together. You know, you've got the slow song that has a few verses and choruses and things, and then we've got this... Is it sort of specifically Irish?

50:05Is that what the influence here? I mean, even just calling it, let's go laughing, let us go laughing, oh, you know, it's English folk or Irish folk or something. I'm thinking Scottish probably more, but that's my roots. But yeah, it's definitely drawing from that tradition, both lyrically and musically. Like a little instrumental break or such that connects the two parts of song. Alright, I wanted to get us to that repeating part,

50:57because then that sort of finishes us up, that you repeat that a bunch of times and jump up an octave and, yeah, to really get us to the next... Yeah, any thought about, do you even recall the composition of this? I know it was so long ago. I still sing that song in shows. I mean, it sounds a little different now after all this time, but it's basically the same. I was thinking consciously of getting that sort of British element into it. I think I was probably listening to Martin Carthy and some other English guitar players and seemed to go with the sentiment as well.

51:30There's some, how do you define a connection like that? It's pretty hard. It always starts with lyrics. And then, so you're looking for music that will support those lyrics, but not interfere. And that will, you know, that's appropriate to the feeling of the lyrics, et cetera. So that's how that song came to be. This has always been on my mind, I think, right from day one. And I always thought about death. So we're all going to die. But why not die happily?

52:00So I think that's where it goes, right? Well, yeah. I mean, that it's all this just evening. I mean, you've got right where there at the beginning, the evening holds the bones of day. So I really like that as an image, but, and you're already like giving the little seed that, you know, this is going to lead to musings about death. Because it's just a strange image to start out with. When describing the beautiful reflection on the water of the sun and the bones of the day? What?

52:31Well, because the day's over, right? Sure. Yeah. Bones. I mean, you walk around in the forest, you find bones. It's like, it's part of the evidence of death is everywhere. And also the evidence of life continuing, like whatever, the individual things die, but the biome keeps going, right? Or whatever would be the right way to put it. So there's no finality anywhere. It's always motion. Part of what's always fascinated me about death is that fact. It's part of the big picture motion of things.

53:04Usually death is a stopping point, but no, it's, we'll all go to bones on and on for many a year because it's, you know, collectively I might die. But, you know, we're, we're, it's the cycle of life, et cetera. Yeah. Musings thereon. The, the holy hermit staff was, did that mean anything in particular? Was that a reference to? That's from the tarot. I, at the time I was, I was very interested in tarot cards for a couple of years in there. I was quite seriously studying the tarot until my dog ate all my notes.

53:34I took that as a sign that I should stop studying the tarot. But, but, but at the time I wrote that song, it was front and center in my life. And, and the, the image of the hermit in the tarot is, is a kind of guide, a spirit guide, you could say. And so that's the reference in the song. Yes. Okay. And that, and that certainly fixes the whole, yeah, you're in a canoe. I mean, it's like you're crossing the river Styx by yourself or something, you know, this kind of a, there's, there's no other people in the songs, what I'm saying.

54:05You're not watching the children on the horizon or anything like that. It's, this is a solitary music. It's just, there's a lot of just me in those songs, especially from that period. Inner musings in a lot of cases got expressed using nature imagery. I just, I found the natural world to be a far more comfortable setting to be in than human society back then. I've changed since then, but, but at that time that was the case. So do you think then in your arrangements, okay, so you have, you're by yourself, but you

54:37have Eric playing his mandolin banjo and they get to dance around together as the song wraps up, you know, I'm sort of thinking of you and your thoughts interacting with nature, right? Because you're by yourself, but yet you have this hermit guide, you know, so there's sort of as if, I don't know, is the adding of one other instrument, was there something significant about that as opposed to, oh, we could have a string bed under this. We could, was it just because, you know, that's all it needed and it was fine. There was no thought, but no, it was pretty much just, I just wanted Eric to be on the

55:10album and that was one of the songs that seemed like we could do a good job of. All right. So just to wrap up here, we're just going to briefly introduce one more and a even more recent compositional thing than the 1999 one from the 2017 album, Bone on Bone. You picked Cafe Society. It's sort of got a blues, sort of a Kierkegaardian dismissing the chatter.

55:37Yeah. Any thoughts about this before we say goodbye here? Well, the guitar riff that is taken from Bill Brunzi. Okay. And the riff stuck with me, the song particularly. I think it's hayblood blues and talks a lot, most of it, and it's kind of humorous, but it's got that rhythm in it. And so that, like I said, it stuck with me all those years and it just seemed to fit with the lyrics and the intent of Cafe Society. The song is a product of the run-up of the 2016 election in the U.S.

56:11And the Cafe Society, part of the Pete's chain, there was a Pete's Cafe around the corner from where I was living. I'd go there in the morning, you know, for coffee. And after, you know, many mornings of walking past this little knot of people that were always there at that hour, like then talking, you know, I would take my daughter to school. At that point, it was, she was in kindergarten. I'd walk her to school and then I'd go and get myself a coffee. So it's, you know, it was like maybe 8.30 in the morning.

56:42There was always this group of people, mostly older people, sitting out in front, having their morning coffee.

Cafe Society and community

56:48And eventually, they saw me go by enough times that they kind of beckoned me over and invited me to sit with them. And it turned out to be this very congenial group of people of all different stripes. There was a woman who was an ex-police officer and there was a guy who was just born rich and all kinds of different people with different tastes and different political views. And we'd just sit around and yak for half an hour or thereabouts. And so the song is the depiction of all of that, but it's in the context of the Bob

57:21Bass and Blather that was going into the campaign. You could see. Yes, it seems ambivalent at the very least, right? It's simple community, but it's misery loves company. Just the very talking about it in the same tone reduces, you know, you'd be talking about the end of the world and then talking about how you got ripped off by the, you know, the guy in the store down the street. Like everything can sort of reduce to the same uniform volume. Yeah. I mean, it's the way it worked and it's kind of life. I mean, you can't escape this stuff. We live in the world, we're confronted with sometimes politics that are easy to ignore

57:54and other times are not so easy. And sometimes an economic situation that where we all feel pretty good and other times not so much. I have felt through my whole adult life that we were on a downward slope in terms of the quality of life in the world that in North America, I guess I should say, because the rest of the world has been wrestling with many of the same issues through my entire life. You know, now we're sort of, there's more things to be scared of now than I knew about growing up.

58:24And I was paying attention when I was growing up to that kind of thing too. You know, what do you do about it? Well, the point of the song really derived after the fact, as I don't start writing the song and make a point, but the song comes out and what it's basically saying is community is the most available, good response we can come up with to confront the stuff that confronts us. If you want to extrapolate from that, the survivalist mentality of like holding up in a bunker with food and ammunition is suicide.

58:56The only hope we have is by coming together and supporting each other, you know, that the song is kind of pointing in that direction. Well, thanks so much for having a little society with me today. And, uh, I will strongly recommend rumors of glory, the autobiography and the new album. And really just, you know, you could just pick an album. There's so many, and you have so many compilations to bring together, you know, to give people a starting point. Uh, it's really been a pleasure making my way again. I'd heard a few songs years over the years.

59:28I knew who you were, but I'd never liked systematically. What is this guy about? And it just, uh, you know, endless, uh, surprises. And we didn't even talk about the, the book turned me on to your, before you were a soul artist that there were rock and roll, you know, so listening to a little bit of that stuff, some of which is available out there. Yeah. It's always fun to see where these conversations go. All right. Here's Cafe Society. Thanks, Bruce. Cafe Society meets it for the beats.

1:00:15Goes on about the going on up and down the street. Talk about evictions, talk about the dogs, the drunkards in the dog park, and the ones that future follow.

1:00:29The caliphate of perverts, the flight of refugees, expanding ranks of homeless and the disappearing bees. Cafe Society, the sip of community.

1:00:43Cafe Society, the beers we love is coming. Hey, it's a way to start the day. Cafe Society, talking of a storm. Talk about the NASDAQ and the racing form.

1:01:14Talk about the opera. Talk about cars. Talk about the desert and the colonies on war. Talk about tsunamis and the crazies with their guns. Crazy ass policemen shooting everything that runs. Cafe Society, the sip of community. Cafe Society, the ministry loves company. Hey, it's a way to start the day.

1:01:48Spend the day. Thank you.

1:02:19Thank you.

1:02:49Thank you.

1:03:19Thank you.

1:03:49Thank you.

1:04:19Thank you.

1:04:49Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:05:19Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any particular really awful ailment was on a lot of drugs for those last days. It went as well as such a thing can go, and I will be forever grateful for his presence in our lives. Now, since recording this over the last month, I first talked to Daniel Cuddy from the band Hypno Love Wheel and The Special Pillow. These are New York slash New Jersey indie bands with a fair amount of psychedelia to them.

1:05:53And then I spoke to another New Yorker, Bob Burt, famed drummer, best known for his work on the early Sonic Youth albums, and then Pussy Galore. And he had his own project and still plays right now with John Spencer, who was the leader of Pussy Galore and Lydia Lunch. So a very interesting character. Make sure you're subscribed to this podcast at NakedlyExaminedMusic.com, or get your experience ad-free through Patreon.com slash NakedlyExaminedMusic.

1:06:25Hope you're doing well, being creative, and just keep on musicing. Until next time, this is Mark Insmeyer signing off.

1:06:44Thank you.