Folk legend Bruce Cockburn gives uplifting performance at City Winery

Canada has produced some truly great folk singers, from Joni Mitchell to Neil Young to Gordon Lightfoot. But there’s a name that belongs on that list that isn’t as commonly known: Bruce Cockburn.

While he did have a couple of hits in the U.S. — namely “Wondering Where The Lions Are” in 1980 — and he even performed on “Saturday Night Live,” Cockburn is better known in the country to our north, where he’s enjoyed a lengthy career of writing both personal and political songs that make listeners feel and think.

And Cockburn does have plenty of fans right here. He played a lengthy show on Friday night to a packed City Winery Pittsburgh in the Strip District, with plenty of audience participation to boot.

The 79-year-old looked like a proper folk singer with his white beard as he took the stage, picking up a guitar and strumming a few forlorn notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was greeted with some chuckles and a yell of “We’re sorry, Bruce!” from someone in the crowd.

While Cockburn did venture into the political a bit, that wasn’t the main focus of the night. He growled his way through the fiery “Call It Democracy,” a cathartic tune from the 1980s about the International Monetary Fund. He also spoke about his world travels, including a trip to East and West Germany during the Cold War, before singing 1986 song “Berlin Tonight.”

“The Communist Bloc, it was starting to break up into component parts, and some of those parts were fleeing to the West without too much difficulty at that time. You could see there was some change, but nothing prepared me for the suddenness with which it actually happened,” he said.

He wrote “Berlin Tonight” after seeing a West German talk show at 5 a.m. in a hotel room, and it’s a fascinating and pensive series of lyrical snapshots about the experience of watching a period of history coming to an end. Cockburn’s voice holds an earnestness that makes you believe he just witnessed these 40-year-old events yesterday.

He also strummed out a bluesy tune called “The Soul of a Man,” originally by gospel-blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, as well as a sardonic song that he wrote in San Francisco leading up to the 2016 election called “Cafe Society.”

So much of the two-set-and-an-encore show was more uplifting, with songs about love, personal journeys and Cockburn’s Christianity. After converting as an adult, Cockburn made his journey into religion into a ribbon that’s wound its way through his discography. He closed Friday night’s show with the moving and hymn-like “When the Spirit Walks in the Room” and a farewell of “God bless you all.”

Cockburn’s voice has always been rich and expressive, but age has added a seasoned roughness that actually lends itself even better to both melancholy tunes such as “Pacing the Cage” — an ode to those moments in life when you’re feeling stagnant and need to make a change — and pure love songs such as “Push Comes to Shove.” Often, he sounded like a mix of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen.

With the exception of trading out guitars — “Quick costume change, much simpler than Taylor Swift’s,” as he remarked — Cockburn mostly kept things simple, sitting and playing onstage. At one point he did do a little “choreography” to get up and play a powerful song on the dulcimer. “To Keep the World We Know” is a song he wrote in 2023 with Inuit artist Susan Aglukark after that year’s bout of Canadian wildfires, and it is a somber but lovely call to action about climate change.

Cockburn proved that he’s also a great spoken word artist, with poetic moments in songs including “3 Al Purdys,” referencing a prolific Canadian poet. It was a song he was asked to make for a 2018 compilation album, and he wrote it in the voice of a verse-loving homeless man — a gruff character voice that he also performed with skill. And a few of his songs, including “King of the Bolero,” featured mouth trumpet solos — very proficient ones!

“Have you had enough to drink yet that you’re ready to sing?” he asked the crowd before playing “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” a jaunty and expansive tune that the crowd knew well — they sang the chorus back to him, call-and-response style. He got similar applause when he began to play “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.” (Fun fact: a cover of this song gave Barenaked Ladies their first Canadian hit.)

With a witty stage presence, decades of intricately crafted songs and a book’s worth of world-spanning stories, Cockburn put on a show that surely enthralled old fans and newcomers alike.