Pheaturing Bruce Cockburn

 

Hey, kids, welcome to the Phile for a Wednesday. How are you? When leaving the house in 2019 we were like keys, phone, wallet. In 2020 it's keys, phone, wallet, make, hand sanitizer, samurai sword, written will, hornet repellent, protest sign, martial arts abilities, stress ball, Holy Water. I'm gonna start of with a story about someone I want to interview so bad. Jon Bon Jovi is at it again breaking the hearts of his fans worldwide with his new song that definitely brings a tear to our eyes. Early on in the coronavirus pandemic, a photo of the singer working at is JBJ Soul Kitchen Community restaurant in New Jersey was posted on social media with the caption, “if you can’t do what you do, do what you can.” The Soul Kitchen is a community restaurant and program created by the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, designed to ensure everyone has access to delicious and nutritious meals. To dine in, one much either make a donation or volunteer. After the photo was posted, the 58-year-old wrote his new single, "Do What You Can," the next day, and now he’s starring in the music video for the song. The video shows the pandemic through the lens of one of the hardest-hit locations, which is New York City. In the video, the singer is seen at some very iconic New York locations such as Broadway, Times Square, the stoop of a brownstone, and on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid. The video also shows several shots of front-line workers, people communicating through windows and doors, children learning via their homes, and people talking with their loved ones through video chat. It also focuses on family and friends, showing how people are celebrating their birthdays remotely, as well as everyday people on the streets wearing their masks as they go about the day. Through a press release about the video, the singer stated, “Shooting a video on nearly empty streets of Manhattan amid a global crisis really told the story of ‘Do What You Can’ from the place where I lived it. And I know those empty streets look similar to so many parts of America battling this pandemic. But the story of everyday heroes showing amazing courage was inspiring to see and the video, much like the song, has a great deal of hope in it too.” "Do What You Can" is available everywhere now, and will appear on his new album "Bon Jovi 2020" which is set to be out on October 2nd. Bon Jovi isn’t the only artist who has used their voice and their talent to support essential workers around the world. Artists like Alicia Keys, Weezer, Elton John, Mariah Carey, the Rolling Stones, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Michael Buble, Luke Combs, and Bruce Springsteen have all helped either raise funds with their songs or participated in remote benefit concerts. 

Singer Taylor Swift criticized President Donald Trump on social media and encouraged her followers to vote in the upcoming election. The artist, who recently released her new album "Folklore," condemned the president for opposing supplementary funding for the U.S. Postal Service. This after it has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and has recently been mired into controversy with its new leadership. Swift tweeted, “Trump’s calculated dismantling of USPS proves one thing clearly: He is WELL AWARE that we do not want him as our president. He’s chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.” The singer continued to denounce Donald Trump’s leadership asking her followers to consider voting early, amid the president’s attack on voting by mail. She wrote, “Donald Trump’s ineffective leadership gravely worsened the crisis that we are in and he is now taking advantage of it to subvert and destroy our right to vote and vote safely. Request a ballot early. Vote early.” It’s no secret that Donald Trump has been very vocal the vote-by-mail method, especially when states automatically send the ballots to all those who are registered to vote. Only nine states and the District of Columbia have planned to hold universal mail-in-elections. But, the president warned that ‘universal’ mail-in voting can cause voter fraud, which was a threat to democracy. A coronavirus pandemic relief package passed by House Democrats would require those states to mail absentee ballots to register voters, but hasn’t gained traction in the Senate with talks about the aid bill stalled. Swift has been very open about criticizing President Donald Trump, and his presidency. The 30-year-old singer took an aim at the president back in May, calling him out after he tweeted about shooting looters in Minneapolis amid the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s death. His tweet was flag by Twitter for violating the site’s rules regarding “glorifying violence.” Trump referred to looters as “thugs” saying that he’d offered military assistance in Minnesota to Governor Tim Walz. Trump tweeted, “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” In response, Swift wrote, “After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November.” Her statment came as a shock to fans since she has stayed out of any partisan politics for the majority of the successful career. She first spoke out about politics back in the 2018 election of Republican representative Marsha Blackburn. Ever since she has made her own views on social issues through her music and activism. 

A federal judge upheld the 28-year prison sentence of a disgraced Pennsylvania judge who locked up thousands of juvenile offenders while he was taking kickbacks from the owner and builder of for-profit detention centers, prosecutors announced today. Mark Ciavarella, a former Luzerne County juvenile court judge, had been seeking a lighter sentence after three of the 12 counts of his 2011 conviction were overturned on appeal. U.S. District Judge Christopher C. Conner ruled this week that Ciavarella, 70, was not legally entitled to a new sentencing hearing. “To be abundantly clear, if we were authorized to reduce Ciavarella’s sentence, we would decline to do so,” wrote Conner, citing Ciavarella’s “abuse of public trust by an elected jurist and the resulting harm to vulnerable juvenile victims.” He said Ciavarella “refuses to acknowledge the scope of his remaining crimes” and stands convicted of taking bribes. In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care. Prosecutors said Ciavarella ordered children as young as 10 to detention, many of them first-time offenders convicted of petty theft and other minor crimes. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out some 4,000 juvenile convictions after the scheme was uncovered. The judges “betrayed their community and deserve the substantial punishments they received,” U.S. Attorney David J. Freed said in a written statement today. Conahan, 68, the other judge in the scandal, was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison. He was recently released to home confinement with six years left on his sentence because of coronavirus concerns. 

Kellyanne Conway, one of President Donald Trump‘s most influential and longest serving advisers, announced Sunday that she would be leaving the White House at the end of the month. Conway, Trump’s campaign manager during the stretch run of the 2016 race, was the first woman to successfully steer a White House bid, then became a senior counselor to the president. She informed Trump of her decision in the Oval Office. Conway cited a need to spend time with her four children in a resignation letter she posted Sunday night. Her husband, George, had become an outspoken Trump critic and her family a subject of Washington’s rumor mill. “We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids,” she wrote. “For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.” She is still slated to speak at the Republican National Convention this week. Her husband, an attorney who renounced Trump after the 2016 campaign, had become a member of the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump. The politically adversarial marriage generated much speculation in the Beltway and online. George Conway also announced Sunday that he was taking a leave of absence from both Twitter and the Lincoln Project. Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, said Monday that her departure leaves a “big hole” at the White House. “This is all about making priority for family,” Meadows told “CBS This Morning.” “That’s what this president is about and that’s what Kellyanne Conway is about.” Her departure comes at an inopportune time for Trump, who faces a deficit in the polls as the Republican National Convention begins on Monday. Asked on CBS whether her departure signals a fear Trump might lose, Meadows called the question “cynical.” “Anybody who knows Kellyanne Conway knows that she has never shied away from a fight,” Meadows said. “To suggest that is just not based on the facts.” Kellyanne Conway worked for years as a Republican pollster and operative and originally supported Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary. She moved over to the Trump campaign and that August became campaign manager as Stephen Bannon became campaign chairman; Bannon was indicted two days ago for fraud. Conway cited a need to help her children”s remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic as a need to step away from her position. She had remained a trusted voice within the West Wing and spearheaded several initiatives, including on combating opioid abuse. She was also known for her robust defense of the president in media appearances, at times delivering dizzying rebuttals while once extolling the virtues of “alternative facts” to support her case. Conway was also an informal adviser to the president’s reelection effort but resisted moving over to the campaign. Her exit was first reported by The Washington Post. 

A Detroit, Michigan woman was declared dead on Sunday morning by fire officials. It turned out to be, however, a shut and open case. As in, they shut the (just barely figurative) coffin and had to open it back up real quick because as it turns out the woman was still breathing. Paramedics from the Southfield Fire Department spent thirty minutes performing CPR and attempting to revive the woman upon responding to the initial call but they could not save the woman’s life. Or so they thought. The woman’s medical information was sent to the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s office and her body was released to the family so that they could begin arranging her premature funeral. The (still living) body was transported to the James H. Cole Funeral Home where the staff presumably had all of their nightmares come to fruition upon discovering that one of the corpses was, as far as they knew, coming back to life. They discovered, in short, that the woman was breathing and thus ineligible for an embalming fluid enema. The woman was transported to a hospital. Her name is being withheld for the time being. So this lady was definitely zipped up in a body bag, right? Hopefully she was unconscious and not in some horrible paralytic state where she was just laying there screaming internally to God begging Him not to let her get buried alive. This woman was also potentially put into a morgue fridge. The only way this day could have been worse for her is if she actually had died. I hope she A) makes a full recovery from whatever happened to her, and B) makes a nice little piece of coin off the town that gave her the world’s worst-ever "Day in the Life" episode. When this woman does eventually die, hopefully a long time from now, her tombstone should absolutely read, “19xx-2020, 2020-20xx.”  

If I had a TARDIS I would like to go play a game of Chess with Bobby Fisher.

But knowing my luck Bobby Fisher, he'd be playing 50 opponents simultaneously at his Hollywood hotel on April 12th, 1964. He won 47, lost 1 and drew 2. In many places, masks are mandatory, so you as well make it your own. There's a mask for every fashion and fandom, and there can also be a mask for every face. People order custom-made masks with photos of their face on them to try and achieve a realistic look. Try being the most important word.  

There's never been an easier time to help save lives. You don't need to be an essential worker, you just simply have to put some fabric on your face when you go out. While face coverings are a simple (and even fashionable) solution to help slow the spread of a deadly disease, many people remain stubborn. Shop owners and neighbors have taken to creative and catchy ways to remind people to hide their mouths and noses away.

Have you seen the official flag of 2020? No? I have it here...

Do your kids like Barbie? Have you seen the new one?

Hahahaha. Okay, did you know some birds have arms and can play the guitar? I'll prove it.

Told ya! Now from the home office in Port Jefferson, New York here is...

Top Phive Movies Teachers Play When They Have A Migraine

5. History = Glory 

4. English = Dead Poets Society 

3. Science = Gattaca 

2. Spanish = La Misma Luna OR Like Water for Chocolate if they thought your class was mature 

And the number one movie teachers play when they have a migraine is...

1. French = La Ballon Rouge OR Dead Poets Society French dub

If you spot the Mindphuck let me know. Okay, let's take a live look at Port Jeff, shall we?

Looks like a nice evening there. Okay, you know I live in Florida, right? Here's another story from this crazy ass state.

A typical kidnapping story normally (not that kidnapping should ever be normalized) can be explained by a range of motives. Single parents could be trying to get their kids back, a pedophile could be on the prowl, or people could have some sort of mental illness that eventually led them to somehow kidnap kids. I’m sure a motive for this kidnapping story will become evident eventually, but the facts are still so bizarre. A Florida woman, 28-year-old Hannah Braun, was arrested for an attempted kidnapping in the city of St. Petersburg. Around 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, she was caught by a Ring doorbell camera knocking on the front door of her neighbor’s house. It’s not clear who let her in, but the doorbell footage shows that she announces herself and was let in. According to the St. Petersburg Police Department, once inside, Braun attempted to take her neighbor’s 9-month-old baby out of the arms of his 12-year-old sister. Suddenly, the child’s mother, Amber, woke up and intervened just in time to stop the attempted kidnapping, “She’s standing in my living room, talking about, ‘I’m just here to get the baby. I’m trying to protect the baby,’” said Amber. Braun was charged with not only attempted kidnapping but also burglary and child neglect because the facts just get even weirder. Not only did another neighbor say that Braun tried to kidnap his 1-year-old daughter from his house that same night, but Braun has two kids of her own that she allegedly left at home alone. “She said she was taking care of babies here. She wanted this baby,” Thelma Reynolds, the 1-year-old’s grandmother told WFLA. So just to sum it up, a woman with two kids, left them at home in the middle of the night to go to her neighbor’s home to kidnap her neighbor’s child. And that was the second time she had attempted that. I have so many questions here. My first one is who let this lady in? If the child’s mother was already asleep, what was a 12-year-old child doing up at 2:00 a.m. holding a 9-month-old baby? Secondly, did the other neighbor let her in too? Is the city of St. Petersburg just such a friendly place that neighbors casually let each other into each other’s houses at, again, 2:00 a.m.? And lastly, of course, what was this lady on that caused her to leave her two young children at home while she went to go kidnap other children? I feel like there were drugs involved, which is so messed up to think about since the care of babies is involved. It really takes someone crazy to not only attempt to kidnap other children, but also inflict child abuse on her own at the same time.

Because telescopes work using mirrors, we’ll never know if there are any space vampires. 

A little old lady was walking down the street dragging two large plastic garbage bags behind her. One of the bags was ripped and every once in a while a 20 dollars fell out onto the sidewalk. Noticing this, a policeman stopped her, and said, "Ma'am, there are 20 dollar bills falling out of that bag." "Oh really? Darn it!" said the little old lady. "I'd better go back and see if I can find them. Thanks for telling me officer." "Well, now, not so fast," said the cop. "Where did you get all that money? You didn't steal it, did you?" "Oh, no, no", said the old lady. "You see, my back yard is right next to the football stadium parking lot. On game days, a lot of fans come and pee through a knot hole in the fence, right into my flower garden. It used to really tick me off. Kills the flowers, you know. Then I thought, why not make the best of it? So, now, on game days, I stand behind the fence by the knot hole, real quiet, with my hedge clippers. Every time some guy sticks his thing through my fence, I surprise him, grab hold of it and say, 'Okay, buddy! Give me 20 dollars, or off it comes.'" "Well, that seems only fair," said the cop, laughing. "Okay. Good luck! Oh, by the way, what's in the other bag?" "Well, you know", said the little old lady, "not everybody pays." 

The 134th book to be pheatured in the Phile's Book Club is...

Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon will be on the Phile on Friday. 

Today's guest is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist who has written more than 300 songs on 33 albums over a career spanning 40 years, of which 22 have received a Canadian gold or platinum certification as of 2018, and he has sold over one million albums in Canada alone. His latest album 

"Crowing Ignites" is available on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. Please welcome to the Phile the great... Bruce Cockburn!

Me: Hello, sir, welcome to the Phile. How are you? 

Bruce: Thank you, Jason. 

Me: So, how to do you pronounce your last name? I think I was pronouncing it wrong since I first heard about you. 

Bruce: Coburn, the "c" and "k" are silent. 

Me: Ahhh. I first heard about you as I am a big Barenaked Ladies fan and they covered your song "Lovers In a Dangerous Time." You're a great guitarist, what was one of your first songs you learned to play on the guitar? 

Bruce: Oh, it might've been "Please Help Me I've Fallen." It might've been come country song I had no empathy with at all but the teacher was starting with something simple. I had already learned how to read music because I had played other instruments, I had taken a year of the clarinet and three years of trumpet before I got around to the guitar. I had a sense of theory and it was a matter of translating it to the guitar which is excruciating at first. The trumpet if you play it a lot the lips gets sore but when someone is learning to play guitar, especially if they don't have an easy one to play it's quote painful on the fingers. 

Me: I tried the guitar and that's why I quit. I play the kazoo and that's not painful. Maybe to the listener but not for me. Hahahaha. Does having a lot of theory before you picked up the guitar make it easy for you to play? 

Bruce: Yeah, I had a lot of that before and I had a lot of that after as well. I studied theory through high school and went to music school for a couple of years to study composition. I had heavy dose of that. 

Me: So, would you say you play guitar different then people who learned to play different ways? Do you know what I mean by that? 

Bruce: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean and that was a shrewd observation or at least a clear one. One of the interesting features of the guitar that is distinct from other instruments is that I can play the same notes in a whole bunch of different places. Which means I can play other notes with it depending where I play that note in different ways. So that's something I tried to make use of. I just learnt a lot about harmonic movement in the course of this studies which I was fairly poor at. It wasn't like I was a great student. 

Me: You weren't a good music student? Really? 

Bruce: Yeah, I was too lazy. Too unfocused. But I learnt a lot just by osmosis. The composition classes were divided into the members of the big band basically. So we would write arrangements for the class, bring them in and we would play. We really got to hear and see graphically the effect of what we were writing. 

Me: So, did this change or have an affect on how you write songs? 

Bruce: That hasn't had a profound affect on my songwriting in a direct way but there's an attitude built into that that kind of forms what I do. I don't like being locked into shapes and particular chord things. Sometimes I get a lot of mileage out of that, there's power there. That's a choice to use but I discovered kind of when I was at Berklee that I don't like chords very much. I really liked music that didn't have any chords more than any other kind. 

Me: What kind of music is that? 

Bruce: Like Indian music or Arabic music where they just don't pay any attention at all to chords. The architecture of the music rather than being a bunch of notes sort of held up against each other to see how they interact, the architecture is more like a moving melody atop of a bass drum. So instead of these blocks of things around there's these single lines but it's always measured against a single note that I'm playing. Or someone else is playing in the case of that music. 

Me: I knew this would be a deep interview, sir. Haha. You have been making music for a long time I think. I think my dad had some of your records. When did your first album come out? 

Bruce: Last year was basically the 50th anniversary of the recording of my first album. It didn't come out until 50 years ago this year but we recorded it in the fall of '69. So here we are fifty years later. 

Me: I was born in '68, sir. So, when you started playing guitar what kinda music were you playing? 

Bruce: I started out doing rags a lot. I just tried to learn Jelly Roll Morton songs, the way he played them. He played the piano so there was a lot of translating involved. Just that music in general. 

Me: Did you ever meet any of those old time rag players? 

Bruce: I did a gig with Stefan Grossman one time, he was a great guitar player, in Italy actually. Stefan Grossman, John Renbourn and I did a show and it was a lot of fun but I was aware of him being there but I listened to the old guys. 

Me: Fifty years ago was the plan and dream to be a touring performer? 

Bruce: I had no dream and no plan. I guess you could call it a dream that I thought of spending my life with a guitar. But that's as far as I took it. I had no clear image where I was going to go. When I went to Berklee I thought I was going to get a music degree and then I didn't know what would happen after that. My parents liked the idea of a degree because it was "something to fall back on." Which as artist should not have. Nonetheless that was THEIR plan. Half way through there I realised it wasn't my plan and that I should be somewhere else. I didn't know where but not there so I left, went back to Ottawa and joined a band and started to write songs. 

Me: How did they feel about that? 

Bruce: They were worried, they were very good about it to me but I knew they were worried about for a few years where I didn't seem to be doing anything. I was playing in bands that weren't very good and so on but I was writing and learning some stuff. At the end of the 60s I sort of played in enough bands that weren't quite it for me and I decided I was going to go solo. 

Me: When do you think they knew that you made the right decision and were first proud of you? 

Bruce: When they saw me on stage at the National Arts Centre. It took a few years. 

Me: Was that meaningful for you? I am sure it was. 

Bruce: It was meaningful to them. I didn't know anything about it until decades later. Nobody ever talked about that kind of stuff. They said they were proud of me and everything. Things picked up after the first album came out and things started happening fast, so they got more relied with it all. 

Me: Do you ever get recognized at all, Bruce? You look like guitarist Martin Belmont from Graham Parker's band a little bit. 

Bruce: I get "aren't you Tom Cochran?" I get that and I get, "Hey, you're Murray McLauchlan." One guy accused me of being Bruce Springsteen in a hotel lobby at one point. I said, "No, no, that's not me." And he got mad at me because I was denying it and he was sure. 

Me: My dad was at a Dave Edmunds concert once and people backstage thought he was Nick Lowe. Then he was backstage at a Nick Lowe concert and someone thought he was Dave Edmunds. Then one time someone thought he was Paul McCartney on the street somewhere and my dad didn't want to break the guys heart so signed the guys autograph as Paul. Haha. 

Bruce: That's funny. The guy had the wrong Bruce but didn't realise it and as I was in a mood that day I didn't straight him out. 

Me: Hahaha. That's what we call preserving the magic, sir. When you write a song like "When a Tree Falls" which became some kinda environmental anthem are you hoping it'll being change or you writing what's just on your mind? 

Bruce: Well, I always hope but I don't expect any given song do any measurable thing. Yeah, I hope people get moved by what's in my heart and my mind and they want to do something, or they don't want to support the people who are able to devote big chunks of their lives addressing these kind of problems. We can't all be David Suzuki but we can all support him. Mostly songs come from a personal response from something. I'm not thinking agenda when I write a song like that. That particular song was occasioned by a radio documentary that I heard on one of the Toronto college stations talking about the destruction of rain forests in Borneo. I had never been to a tropical rain forest but I had been to a rain forest in B.C. and I kind of had a sense of what that would mean. But there was also of course in the Third World when forests get destroyed the people that live in them tend to get destroyed also. So that was happening in Borneo and it happened all through Latin America. So it just seemed there was a lot to say there. 

Me: So, I love your writing style and your songs, Bruce, but your latest album "Crowing Ignites" is an instrumental album. Why is that? 

Bruce: I made an instrumental album because I felt like it. That's the short answer. It just seemed like a good time to do that, not because what is going on in the world but in terms of what I've been up too. 

Me: Bruce, there's a lot to talk about though, right? 

Bruce: Yeah, there's a lot to talk about but there's also a lot blather and I don't know if adding more words to blather is really going to have a very positive affect. There are things certainly worth talking about but the biggest one for me in the short run is the issue of dialogue. The terms of Liberal and Conservative in the states are pejorative on way side or the other. I can't say those words without people getting their hackles up. That's ridiculous and it's a measure of how great that gap has become between I say people who are fearful and people who are hopeful. Or people whose hopefulness is based on their fear and people whose hopefulness is they might be able to do something. We're all fearful. Everybody who thinks should be fearful in the current world but we don't want to make stupid choices because of that. Unfortunately we're seeing a lot of stupid choices on all sides of it. How do we get passed that? I don't know if it's with words. Music is a bonding agent and maybe there's something there. 

Me: When you look back at tour 50 year career what is your favorite memory? 

Bruce: It's all a blur. 

Me: Ha! You gotta have one, sir. 

Bruce: On any occasion a different one is going to come up but what comes to mind immediately was the first time I played Massey Hall. I was opening for Pentangle and I was pretty nervous but I had considerable admiration for those people. I did my set and got to watch them and that was pretty good. It worked out okay, people liked what I did. In that same general era playing the main stage at Mariposa instead of Neil Young who had a problem and couldn't get there or something. It was an amazing shot and I was blind with fear but looking back at it I could remember looking out at the audience thinking aside of being totally surreal this is really great. Look at all these people, they're kind pf smiling. They're not throwing things or anything. That put me in front of the Toronto audience which was a great gift. Stuff like that comes to mind but I still think of all the travels I've been privileged to be able to be engaged in both recreational and development related and touring related, There's been all kinds of different places to go and reasons to be there. There's a lot of stuff to pull memories out of. 

Me: I love the video of you and Steven Page from Barenaked Ladies, who was on the Phile before, doing "Lovers In a Dangerous Time." Do you remember doing that? 

Bruce: I don't remember what year it was but I do remember doing it. We did that a few times and there were times when it was the whole gang we would play it together and there'll be times when it was just one or two of them and we would do that. 

Me: BNL's cover of that song is what got their name out there. That's cool, right? 

Bruce: Yeah. It wasn't even on their album, it was on a so-called tribute album to me. There were a lot of Toronto artists, good ones who contributed songs to that record but that as the one that got the attention on radio for sure. 

Me: Is it meaningful you made your mark on other musicians? 

Bruce: Yeah, I don't know what to make of it really. It's certainly complimentary. In 50 years will anybody remember any of us? I don't know. It's nice... "nice" is a stupid word. It's gratifying and heartwarming really to have my music spread out in society. And then people think enough of it they want to sing it themselves that's a great thing. 

Me: Okay, so, in the future if they made a Bruce Cockburn movie about your life, the credits roll and it fades to black what song is playing? 

Bruce: Hmmmm. I might not have written that one yet. They could play anyone but it depends on the tone of the movie. If the movie was true to life they might play "Night Train." If it's kind of Hollywoodized they might play "Lovers In a Dangerous Time." 

Me: Why "Night Train"? 

Bruce: When I wrote it, my life is a little bit different now but when I wrote it it felt like I wrote some kind of personal manifesto. My own particular state of the world... observations. I think it still hold up although I feel a bit more hopeful generally speaking than that song suggests. But I feel that kind of sums up a lot or if they maybe want to get a little more hipper is "Tie Me at the Crossroads" which has kind of observations of fame and legacy. Tie me at the crossroads when I die, hang me in the wind until I get good and dry. That would be a fitting end for a movie about my life I think. 

Me: Bruce, thanks for being here on the Phile. Please come back soon. You rock. 

Bruce: Likewise. Thanks, Jason.

I loved that interview. That about does it for this entry of the Phile. Thanks to Bruce Cockburn for a great interview. The Phile will be back on Friday with Jim Carrey! Spread the word, not the turd, or virus. Don't let snakes and alligators bite you. Bye, love you, bye. Kiss your brain.

I don't want you, cook my bread, I don't want you, make my bed, I don't want your money too, I just want to make love to you. - Willie Dixon