Hudson River Revival addresses global issues

Thursday, June 14, 2007 - Poughkeepsie Journal
Hudson River Revival addresses global issues
Weekend fest features musical lineup, exhibits, food and more
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn some time ago was driving from St. Louis to Kansas City on his way to Los Angeles through a landscape that featured not much more than rolling hills and billboards.
Along with anti-abortion billboards and billboards advertising sex clubs, there was one for tattoos that really caught Cockburn's eye.
"It said, 'Mike's Tattoos, Done While You Wait,' " Cockburn recalled this week during a telephone interview with the Journal. "I thought, 'That's got to be in a song.' "
That image found its way into a song, "Life Short Call Now," the title track of Cockburn's most recent record. The song and album title, Cockburn said, draw inspiration from the "infomercial" society some of us live in, but was also written while he was between relationships.
"There was nobody lining up to call me," he said. "I thought, 'Somebody is out there that can offer an alternative to the loneliness of the road.' As it turns out, there was."
The long road Cockburn has traveled will lead him to the Hudson Valley Sunday, when the guitarist is set to perform solo at the the 41st Clearwater Festival, an annual gathering at Croton Point Park in Westchester.
The Poughkeepsie-based environmental organization Clearwater was founded by Fishkill resident and folksinger Pete Seeger to raise awareness of environmental challenges facing the Hudson River. The festival runs Saturday and Sunday, with a wide range of activities and music by the Cowboy Junkies, Leo Kottke and Seeger, whom Cockburn called "a moral and musical influence ... on the American scene."
"We've been trying to get Bruce for a long time," said festival director Ron Aja. "He is one of the kindred spirits. He cares about the world, he cares about the environment."
Cockburn has over his decades-long career addressed in song many of the issues Clearwater has tackled - nuclear power, clean water and mankind's overall destruction of the environment, among them.
Cockburn, in his music, also addresses intimate personal relationships, as well as far-reaching global issues like the fallout of war. The release of "Life Short Call Now" followed a trip he took to Iraq after the U.S. invasion.
Similar journeys Cockburn has taken to Nepal and Nicaragua have also inspired songs, and his albums serve as something of a diary of his journeys. He could play those songs Sunday at Clearwater, when the woven, meditative finger-picking that is a staple of his guitar playing will be punctuated by singing that moves effortlessly between a roar, a quiver and a whisper.
Cockburn recently traveled to Venezuela and was there for that country's elections.
"There is a sense of people being drunk with hope," he said. "The hope was there and it was really exciting."
Cockburn, however, hasn't written any songs about the trip.
But, "You never know," he said. "... I took a lot of notes, as I generally do when I go on a trip."
Cockburn's performance in Westchester will put him on the shores of a river polluted by a global corporation, General Electric; and several miles from a nuclear power plant - Indian Point - that has generated a lot of controversy. Both the river and the power plant could easily end up in a Cockburn song.
"The imagery is powerful," he said. "... It seems appropriate for me to play an event like this."
At the heart of this man, though, along with the issues he sings about, is the music. Truly, Cockburn and Seeger are, as Aja put it, "kindred spirits."
"Pete Seeger," Cockburn said, "is an unimpeachable image of integrity."