Bruce Cockburn

Item: Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu
Author: Steven S. Baldwin

Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu

(1999)

Reviewed by Steven S. Baldwin

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Label RykodiscThe Phantom Tollbooth1999

blues rock folk rock singer-songwriter

A long time ago in another life I had a girlfriend who exclaimed that Cockburn sounded like a sick cow. Granted, his husky baritone is a far cry from her beloved Rick Astley's perfection, but please... She's history, and I continue to listen to Cockburn's albums, which never resemble the melancholy mewls of moo-moo land. But I can't help but wonder if she'd like this one. Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu is Cockburn's most playful album ever. A mature work that slaps up bits of the requisite, insightful political and spiritual commentary alongside more whimsical moments. The album begins, for example, with "When You Give It Away," featuring lines such as:

Slid out of my dreams like a baby out of the nurse's hands
on to the hard floor of day
I'd been wearing O.J.'s gloves and I couldn't get them off
It was too early but I couldn't sleep
Showered and dressed and stepped out into the heat
The parrot things on the porch next door
announced my arrival on Chartres Street
with their finest rendition of squealing brakes...

Along the same lines as this wry bit of contemporary-peppered wit, Cockburn offers a number of other songs with a lighter touch, including a rare cover version of "Blueberry Hill." The second song, "Mango," sweetly dishes up the zesty fruit in a sexually-charged parody of Adam and Eve's temptation in Eden, and "Let the Bad Air Out" takes government excesses to task in a playful, but forceful manner:

Traitors in high places, take my money, tell me lies
Take a walk past parliament, it smells like something died
They ask for trust, but somehow I've got serious doubts
Open up the window, let the bad air out.

Yet, despite the album's more jovial tone, Cockburn also offers his trademark contemplative bits in other songs like "The Embers of Eden," which use the images of the Great Wall of China and scorched rain-forests (the only two visible evidences of mankind from orbit) as metaphors for a troubled relationship.

Cockburn's official twenty-fifth release finds him still experimenting and tinkering with his sound: a unique patchwork quilt of poetic reflections and jazz-infused, finger-picking blues and folk. The tinkly chimes of The Charity of Night are replaced here with world-beat rhythms, but overall the sound is less thick and more straightforward, focusing on loads of impressive guitar playing. Taken as a whole, this album does recall moments of his last one, especially with the spoken word poetic parts, as well as the more introspective work of his seventies material, resulting in a little something for everyone. Only the beautiful instrumental "Deep Lake" seems quietly out of place, dampening the album's momentum.

After twenty-five albums and about thirty years of recording, artists earn the right to do whatever they want. Gratefully, far from being alienated by this work, Cockburn fans are again treated to substantial musical art from an artist who is far from going out to pasture.

5 tocks