Bruce Cockburn has long been an artist I feel that I should like more than I actually do. He ticks all the boxes: sort of folk rock style singer-songwriter who writes intelligent and thoughtful lyrics. Yet I have never quite taken him to my heart. I listen to an album, think it's pretty good but then don't go back to it. Part of the problem is that I found some of his political songwriting in the 1980s overly didactic and dogmatic. (Don't get me wrong, as a fan of Bob Dylan and Neil Young I hardly object to political songwriting but I want to be moved rather than hectored.)
This year, though, I decided to give him another whirl, in particular his mid-1990s albums Dart To The Heart and The Charity Of Night. Both have a political as well as a personal dimension, but are less direct and in your face than his previous work, and the more rewarding for that. I've only just realised that both these albums were produced by T-Bone Burnett, which probably helps explain why I like them so much. Closer To The Light is an elegy to Cockburn's friend the songwriter Mark Heard who died tragically young at the age of 40 in 1992. I hope to write more about Heard another time, but this is a quietly powerful song that I ended up playing over and over.
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