Few musical artists are able to compile a retrospective that encompasses half a century's worth of career. A star who has amassed just about every honor his native Canada has to bestow, Bruce Cockburn picks 30 favorites from his sizable singer-songwriter's catalogue and offers them up in two discs for an audience of both fans and those being introduced to his music. The latter includes me. Though I have known Cockburn's name for a long time, I don't recall that I have ever actually heard him till now. So far as I know, I haven't heard so much as a cover of one of his songs.

The Canadian performers and composers with whose work I am familiar are the likes of Ian Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, the McGarrigles, Stan Rogers and, lately, Colter Wall, all of whom fall easily into the folk category. Cockburn, on the other hand, is largely a pop-rock figure -- in other words, a creature more of the 1970s than of the 1960s -- with more elevated ambitions than the typical seeker of pop stardom. Thus, besides material written with an ear to the Top 40, there are protest songs expressing the sort of unfiltered rage one associates with, say, Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" and "With God on Our Side," except that Cockburn's melodies are his own, typically not folk-like, not borrowed or stolen (choose your verb) from tradition (in the case of the just-mentioned Dylan, "Nottamun Town" and "The Patriot Game" respectively).

The one song I had previously heard of is "If I Had a Rocket Launcher," written during the Central American civil wars, most notably the one in Nicaragua, in the 1980s. The Nicaraguan conflict pitted the Reagan Administration-armed Contras, a murderous outfit representing reactionary forces, and the leftwing Sandinista guerrillas, worshipped by naive revolutionary tourists who flew in from Western democracies. After following events closely back then, I deduced that (1) both sides deserved to lose and (2) the victims, as usual in these situations, were the innocent people on neither side. If you hear "Rocket Launcher" in such a context, it is powerful first-hand testimony to that sad reality. The Sandinistas now rule Nicaragua, and about as heartlessly as would have the men in the helicopters Cockburn fantasized about shooting down. The corruption, oppression and poverty that pervade that battered country are, no surprise, the same as they were before all the shooting and dying began. Yes, it's depressing to contemplate how few genuine heroes there are in this world. Now there's a song idea for Cockburn, if it hasn't already occurred to him.

Besides the topical numbers, Cockburn addresses, often eloquently, personal and spiritual matters, once in a while in acoustic arrangements that document what a gifted guitarist he is. On occasion, one hears a pronounced Beatles influence; the early "Musical Friends" actually sounds like an outtake from one of their later, pre-breakup albums. That extends to some of the more or less acoustic works, suggesting that even the occasional folkier cuts (the opener "Going to the Country") are ultimately shaped by that source. On the other hand, "One Day I Walk" has the resonance of a particularly moving 19th-century hymn and suggests an alternate route Cockburn might have taken. Given his manifest commercial success, though, it's just as well that he didn't. The last thing any ambitious musician should do is to listen to my advice.

Still, True North is a folk label. On his upcoming winter/spring tour Cockburn is playing at clubs and venues such as a two-night stand (March 10-11) at Chicago's venerable Old Town School of Folk Music. The lesson to be drawn may be that even a better-than-the-usual musician who has been around long enough starts at some point to be seen as the relic sum of his or her distant influences. (Not stated waspishly; the same can be, and is, said of Dylan.) Lacking any other genre categorization, they get dropped into the ever more amorphous "folk" bin. Or maybe, given how fast and often styles go in and out of fashion these days, the nearly forgotten, once ubiquitous pop-rock of decades ago feels something like a strain of hoary traditional music.

In any case, Cockburn has made the best of it. If you grew up with pop-rock and miss it, you will probably like his imaginative reinvention. It must have sounded revolutionary in its original incarnation.

[ visit Bruce Cockburn's website ]