June/July 1992
"Cause the governing body of the holy land is that of Herod, a paranoid man, when he hears there was born a baby King of the Jews, sends death squads to kill all male children under two.' I wanted to put it into terms people can relate to now, because the story itself is so familiar, that its been reduced to traditional images that really work against our understanding of it as a human story. A story that happens to people. You know Joseph's got a saint in front of his name and Mary's got a halo. Those images are so entrenched in people's minds. The fun part of writing a song about it was to crack those images and try to see through to the lives of the people who were directly affected by those events."
-- from "Bruce Cockburn an Update" by Lahri Bond in the June/July 1992 Dirty Linen (#40). Anonymous submission.
1994
"I wanted to write a Christmas song. I went at it like trying to tell the Bible story but put it in modern terms. Like the Goddard movie "Joseph and Mary". I thought the story in the Bible is such an interesting story, but you forget how interesting it is because it's held up as a cliche so much to us. And over the years people have lost their humanity, who are in the story, and they've become larger-than-life figures. And I just thought it would be interesting to play at putting them in a human context. So Mary becomes a little bit shrewish and has a little bit of an attitude. The classic Mary figure, the Madonna - the original Madonna - is a far cry from any young Jewish mother I've ever run across [Laughs]. So I wanted to get it into something that people could relate to."
-- from "Closer to the Light with Bruce Cockburn" by Paul Zollo, SongTalk, vol.4, issue 2, 1994. Submitted by Rob Caldwell.
year unknown
[According to Cockburn the project became less of a 'job' and more of a united experience.]
"at one point, during the song "Cry of A Tiny Babe" (about the birth of Christ) Jim Keltner broke down in tears. Well, he didn't breakdown-he kept playing but he was fighting it off throughout the song because he was so moved by what was going on," tells Cockburn. "Most songs were recorded in one take which is indicative of a certain focus."
[Possibly the most inspiring song, for Christians, is 'Cry Of A Tiny Babe' a re-telling of the Christmas story. As Cockburn explains, he wanted to look at the event as though it actually happened, because quite frankly-it did.]
"We've tended to lose sight of the reality of that story, of the immediacy of that story because it's so tied up in historical baggage. Mary is always the Madonna with a blue vale and everything. But in the story Mary is a woman who finds herself pregnant and can't explain it to anyone, especially Joseph who's kind enough not to want to see her executed but is sort of trying to extricate himself from the situation. You figure what must have been going through their heads at that time, I wanted to do a song that would address that fact-the humanity of the people involved" finishes Cockburn.
-- from "Bruce Cockburn: The Soul of a Man", by Michael Case, Umbrella magazine, year unknown. Anonymous submission.
November 1999
Steve Lawson: Was that a chance [Christmas] to re-indulge your love of folk music?
BC: Well, in a way.. circumstantially I guess... The Christmas album was something
I'd wanted to do for 20 years because I'd loved that music and thought I
could do something with it, but it took that long to get somebody to pay for
it. We were doing these radio shows out of New York, we did 5 in the end,
which became the Columbia Records Radio Hour, which became a monthly show
that they did, I ended up doing all the Christmas ones.
Steve Lawson: And you duetted with Lou Reed on Cry Of A Tiny Babe????
BC: I know, it amazes me too - you should have been there when it happened. We'd
rehearsed it but he was reading the lyrics off. There we were playing the
song, and it came time for his verse and that's what he did, and I just
started laughing as you can probably hear on the ensuing chorus.
-- from "Bruce Cockburn Interview", Guitarist Magazine, November, 1999, by Steve Lawson.
Help out! To add material to this section, see this page first.
Song Index | Alphabetical Song Index | Chronological Song Index
This page is part of The Cockburn Project, a unique website that exists to document the work of Canadian singer-songwriter and musician Bruce Cockburn. The Project archives self-commentary by Cockburn on his songs and music, and supplements this core part of the website with news, tour dates, and other current information.
