Bruce Cockburn
High Winds White Sky

THE REVIEW

"My canoe lies on the water, the evening raises the bones of the day,
the sun like golden dust, slips away".

Thus Bruce Cockburn consecrates this second work of his, dated 1971.
And in this opening is embedded the entire intent of the delicate singer of nature, the miniaturist of the wonders of creation.
There is an unspoken question underlying every musical phrase. What is this silence around, these still waters that reveal nothing of their being? And without falling into the rhetoric of an impossible answer, Cockburn offers himself to the only condition that does not generate frustration or impotence.

Astonishment. And look, he is enchanting.

Yet, if it were only this, his participation would be nothing more than a suggestion. Leading us into his "ecstasy" is the instrumental texture. A crystal-clear acoustic guitar, caressed with virtuosity never self-serving, which performs a very rare prodigy in the artistic field. It annihilates the distance between "message" and "medium". It places us right in the center of the substance, close to the soul of things, to the point where it becomes almost surprising to remember that it's always the voice and instrument that are the protagonists.

"Love Song", an unusual melodic line, with wide intervals, yet it conveys a genuine and intense soul transport.
"One Day I Walk", a pastoral and melancholic vein for a tender existential nursery rhyme.
The title track, the jewel of the album. The suspension, the connecting guitar phrases, the cold and intimate context.
"You Point To The Sky", still the fresh air hasn’t lifted from the face.

And the final tracks, where the compositional structure also intensifies. In particular "Life Mistress", where a stanza in the usual evocative style is followed by a more lively section culminating in an instrumental part that leads back to the exposition.

Slowly, and perhaps not without a hint of regret, Cockburn will distance himself from these naturalistic contexts and his pure odes to the Creator. He will embrace causes much more immersed in social issues, with peaks of genuine political fervor.
Yet, even in his subsequent production,  it sometimes seems that those primal glances at unspoiled landscapes are still the privileged condition for a truer and deeper understanding.

This is a crystal album, and as such, to be handled with the heart.