Bruce Cockburn

Item: Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu
Author: Jeffrey Overstreet

Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu

(1999)

Reviewed by Jeffrey Overstreet

Discogs Apple Music TIDAL Amazon Music Spotify

Label RykodiscThe Phantom Tollbooth1999

blues rock folk rock singer-songwriter

Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu finds Bruce Cockburn relying on his strengths and taking a breather from the dark imagery and intense subject matter of 1997's The Charity of Night. This album has a lighter tone, rather like the mix of blues, folk, and rock on Nothing But a Burning Light.

Several songs feature spoken-word passages, which he seemed to rediscover on Charity of Night, and the lyrics focus on the search for hope in a failing world...not a new theme for Bruce. Several deal with intimate relationships of friends and lovers, and how the joy of relationships can reveal hope while the world around seems to be burning and collapsing. "Look How Far" is a standout, telling of two friends on a rooftop sharing glasses of wine and marveling at how the setting sun's light illuminates the glasses so that they seem to "glow from within."

"Mango," Bruce has said, is his hymn to feminine sexuality, and it sounds incredible. I'm convinced from the participation of Cowboy Junkies' Margot Timmins that she and Bruce should continue to work together. Their voices are a marvelous match. Bruce actually lets her take the spotlight for a while during a rare and glorious cover track--"Blueberry Hill"--and then he steps in to do some steamy electric soloing.

But for the most part, this is an acoustic guitar venture, with the edges filled in with enthusiastic rhythms. You get the feeling that the music grew out of evening jam sessions and the lyrics out of his travel journals. There are copious references to personal conversations, to views from windows and rooftops, to specific places and times...even what was playing on the radio at the moment (Superchunk!). There's standard (and thus excellent) Cockburn fare like "Last Night of the World," which reminds me of the simple melody of "Dream Like Mine." And then there are more ambitious tracks, like the long poem of "Use Me While You Can," and perhaps his most sonically experimental track thus far--"Let the Bad Air Out." You may remember that Cockburn played "Let the Bad Air Out" on tour frequently over the past few years; its manifestation here is very, very different. Instead of taking the playful tongue-in-cheek rock-n-roll approach that he did on stage, now it's a dreamy, complicated, jazzy number with overlays of whispers and screams...very interesting and strange.

The Charity of Night showed that Bruce Cockburn is still capable of taking great leaps artistically, as a poet and a musician. He seemed to be saying, "Twenty albums, yeah, I know, but my best work is still to come." Having said that, Breakfast in New Orleans... is an album for a warm summer night with friends, where we can smile and enjoy each other's company, knowing that the turning of the millennium gives us nothing new to fear, and that our hope is in something stronger than the darkness that chokes the world. He sounds renewed, refreshed, even younger than he did last time around, slower to anger, like he's really enjoying what he's doing. That's good. I sure enjoy what he's doing.