I love the pounding of hooves
I love engines that roar
I love the wild music of waves on the shore
And the spiral perfection of a hawk when it soars
Love my sweet woman down to the core
There's roads and there's roads
And they call, can't you hear it?
Roads of the earth
And roads of the spirit
The best roads of all
Are the ones that aren't certain
One of those is where you'll find me
Till they drop the big curtain
Hear the wind moan
In the bright diamond sky
These mountains are waiting
Brown-green and dry
I'm too old for the term
But I'll use it anyway
I'll be a child of the wind
Till the end of my days
Little round planet
In a big universe
Sometimes it looks blessed
Sometimes it looks cursed
Depends on what you look at obviously
But even more it depends on the way that you see
Hear the wind moan
In the bright diamond sky
These mountains are waiting
Brown-green and dry
I'm too old for the term
But I'll use it anyway
I'll be a child of the wind
Till the end of my days
Musicians
Bruce Cockburn - Resonator Guitar & Vocals
Edgar Meyer - Acoustic Bass
Booker T. Jones - Organ
Mark O'Connor - Violin
Known comments by Bruce Cockburn about this song, by date:
November 1999
Steve Lawson: After the darkness of Big Circumstance, you came back with a far more commercial album in Nothing But A Burning - a shift to new country?
BC: The term new country got invented after we made that album, but the
conscious effort made in those songs was ...
I'd had this big dry spell and at the end of the 80s, from the middle of '88
to the end of '89 I didn't write anything.
Steve Lawson: Was that scary?
BC: It was very scary, it was sort of like well OK, either I've got to think of
some drastic thing to do or I've got to go and learn a new trade! So I
decided to declare myself on sabbatical, I was gonna take 1990 off, which I
did, and I just announced to the world that I was going to have no public
involvement with anything, and I more or less did that. And within a week of
having started on my sabbatical I started writing, and I wrote Child Of the
Wind, and the songs started coming that ended up making up 'Nothing But a
Burning Light'.
BC:
But there'd been this big clearing of the slate before that, like the whole
80s was cancelled. The thing that I'd realised during that dry period was
that I'd be looking around at songs and I noticed that I had no virtually no
songs that someone who was an untrained guitar player could sit down and
make work, and I thought that was kind of a lack, so I deliberately made an
effort to write songs that you didn't have to play like I do to make them
sound good, you could just strum the chords and they'd still work. So Child
of the Wind was like that, and most of the other songs on NBABL fit that
description. That was on purpose, that had the effect that it wasn't an
attempt to make the songs commercial, it was to make the accessible to
someone that wanted to have fun playing them. And that kind of carried over
into Dart to the Heart, and then I kinda dropped it - I got bored with that!
-- from "Bruce Cockburn Interview", Guitarist Magazine, November, 1999, by Steve Lawson.
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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.
