Bruce Cockburn

With his latest release, You’ve Never Seen Everything, Bruce Cockburn’s musical career as a songwriter, singer and guitarist extraordinaire now spans five decades. After listening to the CD, I am reminded of a 1980 Cockburn track entitled, “You Get Bigger as You Go.” Cockburn’s five decades’ worth of spiritual soul searching, love poems and protest songs, combined with his ability to lay out hypnotic melodies with side orders of biting antiestablishment lyrics, leap-frog over one another to land smack-dab, heavy and hard, on this latest release, his first in four years. Joining the MTV-banned Canadian singer/songwriter are Emmylou Harris, Jackson Brown and Sam Phillips. The result is an intense, demanding-of-the-listener roller-coaster of an album on which, in tunes that move from jazz and hip-hop to the blues, Cockburn wails on subjects ranging from corporate greed and trickle-down economics to hope amidst the ashes of 9/11.