A Quote by Bruce Cockburn

I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.
I was a studio engineer out in L.A. for about six or seven years, and I played sideman for different people, and played in bar bands. I was an old man of 32 when I made my first album.
There was a period after my first solo album came out that about 50 per cent of my work was with symphonies and big bands. We did the Captain and Tennille as well, but it ended up being about 50-50.
I made 'Desert Moon' and when I made those solo albums, I was trying not to be Styx, because I thought, 'That belongs to us.' So, I made different kinds of solo albums that were not dipping my hand back into the magic Styx jar and pulling out all the tricks - because bands, they have tricks, don't they? That's what makes them different.
And the thing about me is, I have a lot of mellow songs, because they're the easiest for me to write. I wanted to try to make some more upbeat songs, so, I ended up gravitating toward writing songs with friends, which was a great learning process, and also we came up with great songs. Those are the songs that came out the most naturally.
I block out a good amount of time - could be 6 or 8 months - and I just write. I do a lot of traveling, and I do a lot of co-writing with different writers just to start getting ideas out and kind of get a little bit of direction as far as where I'm going to go with the album.
There's a lot of bands that don't release an album every year. There's a lot of bands that take three, four or five years off here and there, but they don't say 'hiatus,' so no one really notices it.
My writing was very much like my diary, and I just put it out there to put it out there because I didn't really know what I was doing. The fact that people related to the songs made me feel less alone in a lot of situations.
I've always been a fan of the band setting. I've always been a believer in bands, and I've always been in bands. That's where my comfort zone is. So to stand outside of that, that was never my intention or goal. I never had the dream of, 'I'm gonna go into all these bands as a spring board for my solo work.' But life takes you on different journeys sometimes. I ended up playing a bunch of songs and some of them I really liked.
I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.
I write all the time, and I write a lot of songs, but before I started putting out records, those songs always just ended up on stuff that I did with The Babies.
I write all the time, and I write a lot of songs, but before I started putting out records those songs always just ended up on stuff that I did with The Babies.
I've spent a lot of time in tiny venues in the way that I got my record deal and got my name out there just performing live. I was literally performing my songs in all kinds of different ways with different guitarists, and I didn't have an album up online or anything. It's been a lot of work; it definitely hasn't been a sudden explosion into fame.
I understand why some bands don't like test new songs, but for us it's been very helpful and it hasn't really backfired. I was nervous that our second record was - you know, you could hear the whole thing on YouTube before the album came out because we played it all live, but it ended up being something that people appreciated.
I don't love the years going by. I'd just as soon stay forty-five. But it's OK because I feel a whole lot better than I did at thirty-five.
Some of the most interesting and happiest kids I've seen have lived with a lot of different adults, because a kid can go up to one guy and wear him out. And as soon as the adult gets tired, there are five other guys, or five other chicks to go and wear out, and the kid gets to be very bright - and tolerant, you know, with that many kinds of people around.
I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out how to organize these stacks of 30 years of conversations and dialogues. I finally began clustering them in these different categories, and I ended up with the ones you listed.It's interesting to me the kinds of questions I haven't been called to wrestle with. For example, I don't know what this says, but I'm not asked a lot of political questions.
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