By Paul T. Mueller –
Showcasing most of the songs on one’s latest release while also providing a career retrospective spanning decades is quite an achievement for pretty much any performer. Doing so less than a month before one’s 79th birthday, as Bruce Cockburn did at Houston’s Heights Theater on May 3, falls somewhere between impressive and phenomenal.
With his large walking stick, long white beard and long-tailed coat, the Canadian singer-songwriter resembled an itinerant preacher from an old Western. His performing style recalled that of a preacher as well, tempering intensity and earnestness with good-natured humor. He opened by amusing the capacity crowd with the slightly bawdy “The Blues Got the World… ,” from his 1973 album Night Vision, and drew more laughs by commenting at the end, “I like to get the heavy stuff out of the way early.”
Cockburn, still a prodigious guitarist and a powerful singer nearly eight decades on, filled the first set with nine more songs before taking a half-hour break. He returned for a 10-song second set and wrapped up with a three-song encore. He performed seven of the 12 songs on his latest album, 2023’s O Sun O Moon; they provided evidence that his songwriting skills remain strong as well. In the gently spiritual “Orders,” he listed an array of characters – “The cynic and the crooked priest/The woman wise, the sullen beast,” to name a few – and then noted, “Our orders said to love them all.” The spiritual side also featured in several older songs, including the Dobro-driven “Soul of a Man” and a haunting, reverb-assisted take on “Strange Waters,” from 1996’s The Charity of Night.
Cockburn has long been known for his environmental activism, an interest explored in the new “To Keep the World We Know” and in “If a Tree Falls,” from 1988. His interest in the difficulties of Indigenous people was reflected in the powerful “Stolen Land.”
Some of Cockburn’s better-known songs (“Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” “Wondering Where the Lions Are”) showed up in the second set, and the encore included “Pacing the Cage,” one of several Cockburn songs covered by Jimmy Buffett. A bit surprising, if not disappointing, was the absence of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” but that song’s strident tone might have been out of step with the tenor of the evening. Cockburn closed with “When the Spirit Walks in the Room” from O Sun, a metaphorical meditation on the idea that in the end, our differences are irrelevant. “We’re but threads upon the loom,” the song ends, “when the spirit walks in the room.”
Cockburn accompanied himself on an impressive array of guitars, including six- and 12-string acoustics and a shiny Dobro resonator, as well as a dulcimer and what appeared to be a charango, a 10-string instrument about the size of a ukulele. Percussion on some songs came courtesy of wind chimes, activated occasionally by a kick from Cockburn’s foot.