ALBUMS:
-- You've Never Seen Everything (2003) --


Track Listing:

Cover for the US issues.
Cover for the US issues.
Cover for all non-US issues.
You've Never Seen Everything cover for all non-US issues.
There is also a Japanese Cooking Vinyl version of You’ve Never Seen Everything, and it has It’s Going Down Slow (new version) as a bonus track.
[1] Tried & Tested (5:00)
[2] Open (3:57)
[3] All Our Dark Tomorrows (6:15)
[4] Trickle Down (6:16)
[5] Everywhere Dance (4:18)
[6] Put It In Your Heart (5:23)
[7] Postcards From Cambodia (6:55)
[8] Wait No More (4:04)
[9] Celestial Horses (5:59)
[10]You've Never Seen Everything (9:13)
[11] Don't Forget About Delight (5:48)
[12] Messenger Wind (3:29)
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Album Info:

Production notes:
Produced by Bruce Cockburn & Colin Linden
Recorded and Mixed by John Whynot
Additional recording by Colin Linden

All songs written by Bruce Cockburn

and

Published by ©2002 Golden Mountain Music Group

except: Trickle Down written by Bruce Cockburn, Andy Milne and Carl Walker and published by Golden Mountain Music Corp./Triborg Publishing/Phoe13 Myuzik

and

Everywhere Dance written by Bruce Cockburn and Andy Milne and published by Golden Mountain Music Group Corp/Triborg Publishing. All songs SOCAN.

Recorded between October 7, 2002 and December 16, 2002 at Studio Frisson, Montreal; The Clubhouse, Toronto; Deep Field, Nashville; Groove Masters, Los Angeles and Devonshire, Los Angeles

Mixed at Skip Saylor Sound, Los Angeles

Assisted by Jason Gossman, Bill Lane, Barry McClellan, Con Muurnaghan,Chris Schneer-Dyck,Rich Tosi,Jason Vescio,Jiulio Wehrti

Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, New York

Art direction, design, layout, digital illustration & photography by A Man Called Wrycraft, Toronto Original photograph of Bruce: Carrie Nuttall

Direction: The Finkelstein Management Company, Ltd.
260 Richmond Street West, Suite 501
Toronto, Ontario Canada M%V 1W5
PH: 416-596-8696 FX 416-596-6861
e-mail: general_inquiries@truenorthrecords.com
www.truenorthrecords.com
www.brucecockburn.com

Grateful thanks to the following for their part in the making of these songs; the Infinite and his many agents; Marc Bregman; Don Cockburn; JenCockburn; Federico Fellini; Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hatiz (by way of Daniel Ladinsky); the hospitable folks in the Slocan Valley whose names, alas, I no longer recall; Andy Milne; Sally Sweetland; the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Thanks to M. J. Richardson for a beautiful place for Andy and me to work in, and for the following (possibly apocryphal) quote from Nostradamus:

"Come the millennium, month twelve, in the home of the greatest power, the village idiot will come forth to be acclaimed leader."

Thanks to Debbie Van Dyke of Doctors Without Borders for her recording of the frogs of northern Zambia.

Thanks for the ongoing support of Judy Cade, Leslie Charbon, Bernie Finkelstein and all at True North, Sarah Ives, Sue Jenkins, John Laroque, Linda Manzer and Matt Talham.

Jackson Browne appears courtesy of: Elektra Entertainment
Sarah Harmer appears courtesy of: Round Records
Emmylou Harris appears courtesy of: Nonesuch Records
Colin Linden appears courtesy of: Sony Music Canada
Sam Phillips appears courtesy of: Nonesuch Records


Reviews

  • 2 June 2003 - Review by Cockburn Project Editor Suzanne Myers
  • 7 June 2003 - Review by Wilfred Langmaid, in One Man's View section.


    Known comments by Bruce Cockburn about this album, by date:

  • 8 March 2002

    "Virtually all the songs at this point are acoustic, but that doesn't mean that they won't be treated with a rhythm section or a band in the studio," Cockburn said. They tend to be personal and introspective, but there's a long spoken-word piece about Cambodia. There are some "poppier'-sounding songs. There are no overtly political songs, although the philosophical stances that are described include a jaundiced view of certain political things."

    "I'm just doing what I always do. It's just the blues, really."

    -- from Cockburn's musical passion live in new CD, Anonymity doesn't stop "Greatest Hits" collection, Denver Post, 8 March 2002, by G.Brown.

  • April 2003

    "We’re confronted with great darkness as a species right now, as spiritual creatures on this planet. I don’t think it’s hopeless, and I don’t want this album to make people feel hopeless. But I think we’ve got to call a spade a spade."

    "You look at war and environmental problems and you look at what’s causing them and what’s preventing us from solving them and the trail always leads to human greed. Somebody’s getting paid to keep it that way or make it worse. Everyone’s wondering what it all means and what we can do about it."

    "What I see happening in the face of all this darkness is something new in human spirituality, openness, some sense of our common destiny. We’ve got to keep nudging ourselves in the direction of good and respect for each other."
    -- from Bruce Cockburn's bio on Rounder Records.


  • 4 September 2003 - Martin Wroe talks to Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn about his latest album 'You've Never Seen Everything'. [an interview]

    Martin Wroe: How long has this record been in the making?

    Bruce Cockburn: The writing took place over four years, with the exception of 'Celestial Horses' which had been lurking in the back of my mind for a long time. In fact although we finished recording in December, the experience behind that track took place in 1978. It didn't quite gell as a song back then, I had the verses more or less, but no chorus. It took until 2002 to get that.

    Martin Wroe: You keep hold of ideas for songs for years.

    Bruce Cockburn: I have a suitcase full of notebooks of various shapes and sizes and conditions, going back to 1969. This idea had been with me all that time: the vision that gave rise to the song was a vivid one, the memory stayed with me and came back to me periodically as something I should do something about.

    Martin Wroe: A vision in the mystical sense?

    Bruce Cockburn: Yes. I was staying in people's yards in my truck on my way back from some shows on the west coast. The local people showed me this uncommercialised hot spring that came bubbling out of the mountains. I climbed up and sat up to my neck in this hot sulphurous water - watching a full moon on the other side of this beautiful valley with a lake at the bottom. I didn't literally think there were celestial horses coming down the rays of the moon but that's what I saw in my mind and after all these years I finally got a chorus that pulls it into a song.

    Martin Wroe: When you come to writing new songs, do you go looking in your suitcase for the notebooks?

    Bruce Cockburn: At the end of the last tour I had had a pretty long dry spell, longer than I liked. I took some time off, which was partly why I started looking in old notebooks. At the same time Andy Milne, this young jazz pianist based in New York, came along after a gig and gave me a couple of his CD's and said he would like to co-write some music.

    This was something I had never done before, but his timing was great - why not give it a shot? We ended up with 'Trickle Down' and 'Everywhere Dance'. 'Trickle Down' uses words I had in my current notebook, close to the form they appear on the record but Everywhere Dance just came totally from scratch, sitting at a table talking about ideas.

    Martin Wroe: On first two or three plays 'You've Never Seen Everything' seems quite a dark record?

    Bruce Cockburn: There are a couple of very dark songs on it but to me the whole album has a lot of light about it. As much as my albums are about anything, this one is about hope in the face of the disastrous effects of human greed. There is a reason why the last word on the album is hope.

    I think we are on the brink of a critical moment in human history, with the potential for humanity to move significantly forward spiritually. But in order to do that we have to not self-destruct - as personified by the attitudes and policies of the current administration in DC. They are not the only bad guys but they are a case in point, guys who have no idea what their humanity means and so no idea of what anyone else's humanity means. One theme running through the album is the fact that I'm upset at the way that greed is being celebrated as a virtue instead of being one of the seven deadly sins. That is such a destructive element both personally and globally and we see its effect everywhere. Many of the people who appear to be motivated by hate are actually motivated by fear.

    Hate is nothing, it comes out of anger, out of fear, it is secondary. When I read Sufi literature I don't feel anger I find a very highly developed sense of the interconnectedness of things and people and the importance of love, but when I hear the pronouncements of others from the Islamic side of things, it is a little harder to find that. The same can be said of the Christian community.

    One of the things I try to say in 'You've Never Seen Everything' is that you can look at all this darkness and the horrible aspects of human behaviour and you can become cynical as a response and that is useless. That is never seeing 'the light falling all around'. But if you put it in your heart you still retain the capacity to feel the presence of light as well. All my albums are about me going through my own spiritual changes and this is a case in point. The older I get I kid myself that I am getting deeper, and this is what I have to say about it at the moment.

    Martin Wroe: 'Put it In Your Heart' seems to be an oblique response to September 11, 2001?

    Bruce Cockburn: Yes, it is, occasioned by two things. Initially seeing Jerry Falwell on TV, three days after 9/11, with Pat Robertson sitting beside him, discussing how 'this whole terrible tragedy was caused by gays and lesbians and people who've had abortions.' And he's looking at me, and my initial response was. 'Somebody shoot that son of a bitch.'

    Then I realised that here he is looking to lay blame for this thing and throwing it anywhere based on his pet theories. And there is Osama bin Laden, representing his own theories and his constituency are angry and fearful and bitter. And Falwell is responding in the same way. And now here am I responding like that. OK, here is a very clear chain and it has to be broken and how do we break it? Meditating on that produced the song, the understanding that the only way to cope with things like this is to take them into our hearts. Not to stand back and judge and fear. You have to dive right in.

    Martin Wroe: Is the world getting better or worse?

    Bruce Cockburn: Both. I think there is a richness and beauty in humanity which is flowering right now. There is something new in human spirituality, openness, a sense of common destiny. We've got to keep nudging ourselves in the direction of good and respect for each other.

    But there is also this incredibly dark stuff on the horizon. In American I talk about it in terms of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: it is as if the Hellmouth is wide open and all this shit is coming out, as typified by Bush who, if he was a smarter guy would be analagous to the Mayor of Sunnydale.

    And we have to resist that and the only way we can resist is with love because we can't outgun them, they have the biggest weapons. We have to love them to death basically. Everyone who understands the importance of love has to get up and shout about it now and try to live it. That's the only way we are going to survive. And its Love with a big L - Love which understands the inexplicable interconnectedness of everything.

    Martin Wroe: 'Postcards From Cambodia' eludes to that interconnectedness, where you describe what you see as 'too big for anger, too big for blame' and end up bowing your head in 'a prayer for us all.'

    Bruce Cockburn: Standing in front of the Monument to The Killing Fields, the overwhelming feeling is that the whole Pol Pot exercise was a human event not just a Cambodian event. The more people have that understanding the more likely we are to survive the next couple of decades, because the other guys are taking us in a direction where there won't be enough water to go around, where there isn't enough food, where the environment is rendered irreversibly changed for the worse.

    Martin Wroe: This is your 25th original album. Do you ever feel that there won't be another one, that it is too difficult, that maybe, whatever it is, it is gone.

    Bruce Cockburn: I always feel like that. I just don't take it for granted although I have three new songs and a couple of guitar pieces I am working on so there is evidence there will be another album. Who knows what will happen? Ten years from now I will be approaching seventy, who knows what I will feel like then, except that I'm not anticipating retirement! You just keep on going, unless you think of something better to do which I haven't. It doesn't get harder, it gets easier. Nothing gets harder, it just gets different.
    -- from surefish.co.uk: culture - Bruce Cockburn, article by Martin Wroe, 4 September 2003.


  • September 2003 - Commenting on the jazz influence on You've Never Seen Everything

    AG: What led to your collaboration with pianist Andy Milne for the two songs on the new record [You've Never Seen Everything]?

    Cockburn: My friend [violinist] Hugh Marsh, who is very much in evidence on this record and who played with me a lot through the '80s, called up one day and said, "There's this guy Andy Milne, and he's doing pretty neat stuff and wants to meet you." Soon after that we went to New York and Andy came to the gig and introduced himself, gave me a couple of CDs, and said he was interested in collaborating on some songs. The stuff he gave me was amazing. I'd been having this big, long dry spell, and I thought, "This is a gift, a chance to try something I've never done to a significant degree—collaborate with somebody else as a songwriter—and this is going to break the dry spell." We got together, and I had some lyrics that ended up becoming "Trickle Down," but the first thing we worked on was "Everywhere Dance," which we just started from scratch. Andy had a lyric idea, I just started writing stuff, and it immediately went left from where his idea was going, so there's not really a trace of his lyric idea left in the song. He put music to it, and that was it.

    AG: So the harmonies on that came from piano; they don't sound like something a guitarist would come up with.

    Cockburn: No, but it works great on the guitar. This is the wonderful discovery, because when I first heard it, I thought, "This is a song that I co-wrote that I'm never going to be able to play!" But in fact those harmonies fall naturally on the guitar. It was an interesting experience working with him. He's a very talented guy, and his band [Dapp Theory] is so different from anything I've ever worked with. They don't play anything in 4/4 time—everything is in five or seven or 11.

    "We did do a version of my song "Let the Bad Air Out," which they kindly did in four so I could play it. But it was a great learning curve. His band consisted of the standard rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums, plus a female vocalist; a harmonica player, Grégoire Maret; and a rapper named Kokayi. Kokayi improvised parts to Trickle Down," that don't appear on my record—his presence didn't really work with my approach to the tune. In the original version [for Dapp Theory's CD Y'all Just Don't Know], it's half me singing and half Kokayi rapping. [www.andymilne.com]

    AG: Grégoire Maret's harmonica parts are so light and beautiful on this record. They remind me of Wayne Shorter's playing with Joni Mitchell.

    Cockburn: He is a beautiful player. He's got incredible ears. He just listens and finds the right place to go in with these not necessarily obvious notes. He sort of is to Toots Thielemans what Wayne Shorter is to Ben Webster. He's got that command of the harmonica, but he plays in a much more modern way than bebop style.

    -- from "Traveling Light Bruce Cockburn enlivens his new songs with forays into electronica and modern jazz," Acoustic Guitar, September 2003, by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers.


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    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.