ABOUT THE PROJECT
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ON THIS PAGE:
  • Story
  • Geography and People
  • Thanks
  • Weekly, monthly, and yearly visits to this webserver




    Above: A very early Project logo, designed to echo colours used in some of the album art on Cockburn's The Charity Of Night album. Click image to enlarge.
    Story

    Launched on 10 May 1998, "The Bruce Cockburn on Bruce Cockburn Project," aimed to collect Cockburn's comments on his songs as a way of opening up their meaning. By late summer 1998, this documentary process had extended to Cockburn's comments on both albums and unreleased material.

    In the middle of 1999, the Project started offering news feature articles and up-to-date tour information. The Project is not an official site, although tour information is kindly provided by True North Records/Finkelstein Management.

    Towards the end of 1999, other features were added, including an online store, polls, a setlist archive, a news mailing list, and links to the key Cockburn resources on the Internet and in print.

    Click here to view the original Flash intro page that used to introduce the Project. It used the beginning of Cockburn's song, Use Me While You Can, as a soundtrack and borrowed heavily from images of Cockburn in Mali and the promo photos that accompanied the Breakfast In New Orleans, Dinner In Timbuktu album.


    Above: A more recent and temporary Project logo, from 'The Cockburn Project' transition phase. The design is a busy collection of blurred primary colour motifs from Cockburn's The Charity Of Night and Breakfast In New Orleans, Dinner In Timbuktu albums.

    In 2000, the Project shortened its name to, "The Cockburn Project," and began a second redesign to make all of this information easier to access.

    In design terms, the Project's current navigation frame design is based on the cover art of Cockburn's Breakfast In New Orleans, Dinner In Timbuktu album (below right), which was designed by A Man Called Wrycraft using photos by Sally Sweetland.


    Above: The cover art of Cockburn's Breakfast In New Orleans, Dinner In Timbuktu album, on which the Project's current navigation is based. Click image for album info.

    The current Flash intro uses both archive photos of Cockburn and Cockburn's comments on his ongoing creativity throughout his career, to ask the question of the soundtrack song, "What is the soul of a man?"

    The list of Juno awards and nominations that conclude the intro and the historical irony of the US Military's use of If I Had A Rocket Launcher to deprive Noriega of sleep, paint a picture of a varied and unusual journey. "So many miles, so many doors / Some need patience, some need force / All fall open in their own due course..."

    Organisationally in 2000, the Project began assigning editors to focus on different content sections, and continues to encourage submissions from fans of Cockburn's music around the world. For more information about the people who maintain this site, see the contact page.

    Today the Project sees over 10,000 visits to its webserver each month (see below for more information). The Project's online store sold more than 200 Cockburn albums during the last six months.

    If the intent of the many fans who have helped to build this Project since 1998 had to be summarised in a single sentence, it would be a very short one:

    "Bruce, thank you."
    Our hope, in this cyberspace populated by over 300 million humans, is that you'll step inside for a while to find out why we feel the need to say this.

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    Geography and People

    The Project is coordinated from St. Paul, Minnesota since the end of 2001. In line with the international travelogue that Bruce Cockburn's music follows through the years, the Project has previously been coordinated from:

    Today, the editor, Suzanne DeMuth Myers (NY, USA) and the web everything, Bobbi Wisby (CA, USA) are similarly scattered around the world. For more information about people, see the contact page.

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    Thanks

    A deep debt of gratitude to Frank Brusca, for donating the content from his grandaddy of Cockburn sites, Frank Brusca's Bruce Cockburn Pages. Work is ongoing to absorb all of Frank's material into the Cockburn Project site, before Frank finally closes his Web doors. Credits will be added to the sections and pages which derive from Frank's site as this process continues.

    Special thanks to Rob Caldwell for general advice, work in tracking down many of Bruce Cockburn's unreleased songs, and many submissions of Bruce Cockburn's comments on his lyrics; to Suzanne DeMuth Myers for ideas and contributions too numerous to list; to Hanan Elmasu in undertaking most of the original work of collecting the lyrics and marking them up for the Web; and to Bruce Cockburn's management company, True North/Finkelstein Management, for providing the tour dates for the site.

    Thanks also to the many Humans and other visitors to this site for their steady contributions of Bruce Cockburn's comments on his lyrics to this project. This is the only way this Project has grown into what it is. Thank you all.

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    Weekly, monthly, and yearly visits to this webserver

    The Project regularly receives e-mail from those interested in Cockburn's music expressing thanks for the resource. Offering Cockburn's commentary next to songs and albums seems to be deepening understanding of them and helping people further appreciate the complexity and depth of the music, while also opening up some of the political and social issues raised by the lyrics. Webserver statistics for 1999 and the early part of 2000 reflect this growing interest by a steady increase of visits:

    Time period Weekly visits (average*) Monthly visits (average) Current annual rate % change since last period
    Jan/Feb 1999 184 797 9,568 n/a
    Mar/Apr 1999 254 1,101 13,208 + 38 percent
    May/Jun 1999 456 1,976 23,712 + 80 percent
    Jul/Aug 1999 797 3,454 41,444 + 75 percent
    Sep/Oct 1999 1,572 6,812 81,744 + 97 percent
    Nov/Dec 1999 1,662 7,202 86,424 + 6 percent
    Jan/Feb 2000 2,108 9,134 109,610 + 27 percent
    Mar/Apr 2000 2,269 9,832 117,988 + 8 percent
    May/Jun 2000 2,368 10,261 123,136 + 4 percent

    Note: After the end of July 2000, before which the Project existed as a sub-directory of nigelparry.com, figures were calculated by taking the weekly totals of visits to nigelparry.com as a whole and multiplying them by the percentage of file accesses registered for the /brucecockburn/ directory. These statistics were taken from each of the eight weeks that fall into every two month period, averaged (to get the weekly rate) multiplied by 52 (to get an annual rate), divided by 12 (to get a monthly rate) and rounded off to integers.

    After the move of the Project to cockburnproject.net, at the beginning of August, dedicated webserver stats came with the new server.

    Approximately 42,684 individual visits were made to this site during 1999. The current rate and growth curve suggests that there will be over 120,000 visits during Y2K.

    Friendly advertising is welcomed. For more information, get in touch visit the advertising page.

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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.