1992
Johnny Walker: One thing that T-Bone seems to have done is suggesting people who would work on the album, and for a change you made it in Los Angeles rather than
Canada, and Booker T Jones plays organ on it, of Booker T and the MG's fame.
BC: Yes, we had a great cast on this record, which is largely T-Bone's doing.
He came up with this list and, as it turned out, they were all available,
which was a bit of a miracle in itself. We had Jim Keltner on drums, Booker
T. I mean, for the average person that doesn't read their liner notes, Booker
T'll stand out from the rest. We had Jackson Browne, who also played guitar
on a song called Indian Wars (sort of a rhythm guitar part) and sang on it,
and sang on a couple of other things. Sam Phillips also sang some stuff and
generally we had a wonderful time.
JW: You obviously wanted a change of sound, then, by recording in LA. Were
you not worried, though, that it might end up a bit too polished, a bit too
session-sounding.
BC: No, I wasn't worried about that. If it had seemed like it was going to go
that way we wouldn't have pursued that direction at all. What I really wanted
was to do it anywhere but Toronto, because for the last twenty years I've
been recording in Toronto and I needed a change.
- Radio Interview, BBC Radio 1, 1992, Interviewer Johnny Walker. Transcribed and submitted to the project by David Newton.
Spring 1993
James Jensen: The album "Nothing But a Burning Light" introduced a new producer
(T. Bone Burnett) and a new flavor or sound including Dobro.
BC: "Soul Of A Man" is a long time favorite of mine and I'd played it
live but never recorded it but T Bone asked me in pre-production if I
had any other things I could think of to record and it just came to
mind because of the content of the song and the style seemed to fit
what we were doing. That album was a conscious attempt to get at
singable melodies that didn't count on a guitar part to make them
work which made the songs structurally simpler. It struck me at one
point that I almost had no songs a non musician could just sit around
and sing and I thought that was a kind of an absence and I'd rather
be remembered for having songs that people could sing at a party or
whatever. It seemed like there was a bit of a gap there and I was
trying to address it and still am on the current album. (I was told
that this album will be a first in that it contains only love songs)
-- from an Interview by James Jensen at Sunset Sound, Los Angeles, circa
Spring 1993.
7 September 1996
NY: What were you going for musically on this recording [The Charity of Night]?
BC: Something different. The last two albums, there's been a kind of deliberately "rootsy", if I can use that term, approach. Especially on [Nothing But a] Burning Light, and that carried over onto Dart to the Heart, which was the album that followed that.
[...]
NY: Still though, when you put out your first album in 1970, are there ever points where you feel frustrated... like you don't know where you're going to grow as an artist or where you're going to go next?
BC: Yeah, all the time. Whether it's frustrating or not, it's not always that way. But certainly there have been periods...I think it was 1989 - the second half of 1988 and all of 1989 I didn't write anything, and I thought that I might have to go look for other employment you know... Go back for re-education or something, but in the end I took some time off and within weeks of having officially declared myself off, I started writing the songs that ended up on Burning Light. That's the gravest example of that kind of frustration, but a lot of it's just a waiting game. You get used to just kind of staying open to whatever's going to come along and hope that you're awake enough to kind of seize on it when it does.
-- from "Definitely Not the Opera", CBC Radio, Interviewer: Nora Young, 7 September 1996. Anonymous Submission.
November 1999
Steve Lawson: After the darkness of Big Circumstance, you came back with a far more commercial album in Nothing But A Burning - a shift to new country?
BC: The term new country got invented after we made that album, but the
conscious effort made in those songs was ...
BC: I'd had this big dry spell and at the end of the 80s, from the middle of '88
to the end of '89 I didn't write anything,
SL: was that scary?
BC: It was very scary, it was sort of like well OK, either I've got to think of
some drastic thing to do or I've got to go and learn a new trade! So I
decided to declare myself on sabbatical, I was gonna take 1990 off, which I
did, and I just announced to the world that I was going to have no public
involvement with anything, and I more or less did that. And within a week of
having started on my sabbatical I started writing, and I wrote Child Of the
Wind, and the songs started coming that ended up making up 'Nothing But a
Burning Light'.
BC: But there'd been this big clearing of the slate before that, like the whole
80s was cancelled. The thing that I'd realised during that dry period was
that I'd be looking around at songs and I noticed that I had no virtually no
songs that someone who was an untrained guitar player could sit down and
make work, and I thought that was kind of a lack, so I deliberately made an
effort to write songs that you didn't have to play like I do to make them
sound good, you could just strum the chords and they'd still work. So Child
of the Wind was like that, and most of the other song on NBABL[Nothing But a
Burning Light] fit that description. That was on purpose, that had the effect that it wasn't an attempt to make the songs commercial, it was to make the accessible to
someone that wanted to have fun playing them. And that kind of carried over
into Dart to the Heart, and then I kinda dropped it - I got bored with that!
SL: Any label pressure [re: Nothing But a Burning Light]?
BC: No - well, record companies like radio air-play - but nothing that affected
the content of the songs, or even really the way we recorded them. The
choice of T-Bone Burnett to produce those records was a process that
involved the record company, but we had a list of people and he was on
everybody's list. The sound of those records owes everything to T-Bone, and
to the particular to the writing of the songs that set that up.
SL: Burning Light is an amazing sounding album.
BC: Nothing But A Burning Light came out really well. Dart to the Heart we
didn't get as lucky on, although there's still a lot that I really like
about that. But NBABL was one of those instances where everything falls
together exactly right. It was such a great band on there - Keltner and
Michael Been, Edgar Meyer and Booker T.
SL: Two albums with T-Bone on the major....
BC: ..and the Christmas album which was done sort of in between, which I produced though I owe a lot to T-Bone for that, for the inspiration of his
attitude towards production more than any of the technical stuff. I guess it
was the same as my process of learning from guitar players, I didn't study
what he did, but I picked up an understanding from him of how to focus on
the essence of a song without screwing it up in the process of adding
instruments to it. There are many many ways that you can mess with a song in
the studio so there's something very important about uncovering that essence
and keeping it in the forefront.
-- from Bruce Cockburn Interview, Guitarist Magazine, November, 1999, by Steve
Lawson.
3 March 2001
Greg Quill: In the late 1980s, Cockburn didn't write a song for almost two years. He even considered abandoning music altogether.
BC: "It scared the hell out of me, I thought I'd either have to go and learn a
new trade, or take a year off and see what comes.
I've always loved comic books, and I seriously thought at the time that I'd
take a stab at art school to improve my drawing skills. Or collecting
garbage. Or working in a book store. It wasn't a pleasant time.
Instead, I took some time off, and within a week, I started writing the songs
that became the Nothing But A Burning Light album. I was just burned out,
choked up."
-- from "Why Bruce Matters Now", The Toronto Star, March 3, 2001, by Greg Quill.
Help out! To add material to this section, see this page first.
Albums Index
This page is part of The Cockburn Project, a unique website that exists to document the work of Canadian singer-songwriter and musician Bruce Cockburn. The Project archives self-commentary by Cockburn on his songs and music, and supplements this core part of the website with news, tour dates, and other current information.
[1] A Dream Like Mine (3:53)