With Bruce Cockburn set to open a tour early next month, we’ve decided to share this My Page piece from September/October 2006…

I dropped out music school then of 1965 and joined a rock band and started writing songs. I had no idea it was going to go anywhere. I knew my future was all tied up in the guitar, that’s all I knew. It’s turned out to be a pretty interesting journey.

In my case, my songs are pretty much based on my life in one way or another, not all literally. That’s where I get my material from, the things I encounter, the things I feel. A classic case in point would be “If I had a Rocket Launcher” [from 1984’s Stealing Fire. In that song I’m feeling like if I had an RPG and I knew how to operate it, I would be shooting down those helicopters. But I didn’t and I wouldn’t. It’s how I felt at the time and I wanted to share that feeling with people because I thought people in my world should know how easy it is to feel that way.

Back in the early ‘80s when we were able to deny that there was any bad stuff going on, people were doing just that. And castigating those who took place in revolutionary movements or anybody who was willing to pick up a gun to change the status quo was suspect. I’ve never been a pacifist per se, but obviously anybody with a brain thinks that peace is better than war. At that time I had never been in the Third World before, never been to a war zone before, never been around guns in a way I got to be when I went to Nicaragua.

I did feel a burden for the next couple of years. Every time I would perform the song, I went into this long explanation which probably bored everybody to tears of how the song came to be so people would know what it was about. I felt a certain burden to that but as far living up to people’s expectations, I think you have to get rid of that sense early on. Of course, I have my own expectations as far the quality of what I do – the intention is to keep getting better and I have strong feelings about that.

I think people have a right to expect quality from me, from any artist whose work they want to buy, but I think that’s all they have a right to expect. In my case, I feel that my job is to tell the truth as I understand it in whatever way seems most appropriate. Truth is something that none of us has too firm a handle on. We’re always having to explore what that is and having to reexamine our assumptions and see if they’re really true or not; if we care about this issue. To me it’s the essence of what I do. The whole point of making songs is to create a bridge between my experience and other people’s experience, an emotional bridge. In order to do that, the songs have to be true. So that’s the burden I feel but that’s my own burden. It’s not a result of anyone else’s expectation.

One of things that happens in terms of the expectations though is that people think that once you’re out there in public that they’re actually seeing you, the whole you. It’s a mistake in every case. We don’t see the whole Britney Spears no matter much her buttocks are exposed in the tabloids. It’s not knowing her; it’s just knowing a bunch of stuff about her that may or may not be true. In my case, most of what people associate with me is probably true in one way or another – and I’ve been spared the tabloid experience – but it’s never the whole picture. Nobody’s that simple.