After a lifetime spent making music, Bruce Cockburn has probably earned the right to make an album of the songs that helped turn him into the artist he became. The idea for this one has been with him since the 1980s. Now, finally, those songs have been gathered together on The Blood Of Others.
There is something rather lovely about that. Music stays with us, attaches itself to memories, and sometimes means something entirely different when we return to it decades later. You can hear all of that here.
“Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down” opens things, and something in its depth takes me back to hearing Kelly Joe Phelps for the first time, perhaps 25 or 30 years ago. This sort of gospel blues can be so bare, yet so warm and welcoming. Cockburn understands that perfectly. “I ain’t gonna do like I did before” feels like the sort of line that carries a little more weight with every passing year.
“As Time Goes By” brings the familiar into the present, updating its opening to acknowledge the backlash against AI. The song’s enduring belief in love feels ever more important in a world finding new ways to complicate itself. Cockburn gives it room to speak.
The setting throughout is wonderfully intimate. One man and his guitar is all “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” needs, while “You Belong To Me” sounds cracked and sorrowful. Cockburn first heard the latter as a small boy, and there is something deeply affecting about imagining the excitement it stirred then against the weight it carries in this performance. Same song, a lifetime between the two encounters. It is absolutely brilliant.
“That’s All Right” is one of the few here I knew well, and surely most listeners will recognise it. His treatment owes more to Arthur Crudup’s original than the version Elvis made famous, though, and that suits the record beautifully. “Four Strong Winds”, the youngest song in this collection, takes him back to hearing Ian and Sylvia at an Ottawa coffeehouse. Even the most familiar material has a personal history attached.
There is a touch of Dylan in the way he approaches “God Bless The Child”. Listening to the Billie Holiday standard, I could picture Dylan on the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour: a light catching him, the rest of the stage in shadow, every word demanding attention. Cockburn has that same ability to make a performance feel private even when he is sharing it.
“Louis Collins” and “Yellow Dog Blues” offer a couple of blues standards, with the fingerpicking a pleasure in itself. The playing never needs to announce how good it is. You hear it in the phrasing, and in the space he leaves around the voice.
“Fare Thee Well” has another connection: he performed it with the McGarrigle sisters at Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration. There is such love in the way he revisits it. “I’ll Be Seeing You” goes deeper still, incorporating a lyrical change that reflects a relationship of his own. These songs have lived alongside him long enough to hold his experiences too.
“Laplegged Drunk Again”, a longstanding favourite, finds him enjoying the blues, before “One For My Baby” brings out an almost jazz delivery. That influence has been there throughout, but here it comes particularly naturally.
“Les Feuilles Mortes”, the French song known in English as “Autumn Leaves”, adds chiming sounds to its opening, the only departure from the voice-and-guitar setting. It offers a little different colour before “Peace In The Valley” closes things. As someone who collected Elvis albums back in the day, I knew his gospel version. Cockburn finds something beautifully fitting in its quiet reassurance.
The first album I heard that showed me what a voice and guitar could achieve was Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Perhaps some of these songs had a similar effect on Cockburn. Certainly, he has carried them with him.
The album takes its name from Simone de Beauvoir’s novel, written during the Nazi occupation of France. Here, the title acknowledges the songs of others, but everything Cockburn has lived and learned seems to have gone into the way he plays them.
This feels like a record he needed to make. A lifetime in music has gone into taking songs that meant so much to him and making them something special for the rest of us.
Rating: 8/10
