Review of Bruce Cockburn, You've Never Seen Everything, True North Records, 2003. Produced by Bruce Cockburn and Colin Linden.

What happens when "the vil lage idiot takes the throne?" hat happens when "his is the wind in which, all must sway"? What happens when the spirit of the age is committed to the insanity of greed and "hooked on avarice"? Well, sings Bruce Cockburn, "all sane people, die now" and are "lifted tip and carried away." Why? Because "you've got no home in this world of sorrows".

We live in a time of exile. We are exiled from sanity, from grace, from love, from spiritual openness. And in such exile we live "under the rain of all our dark tomorrows," we "ride the ribbon of shadows" and "never see the light falling all around." And we run the risk of losing all hope, of moving beyond the humility of acknowledging that "you've never seen everything" to the despair of not being able to see at all.

Bruce Cockburn's twenty-seventh album is a prophetic response to our time of exile. Combining evocative and hard-hitting lyrics with impeccable musicianship, Cockburn weaves together his own classic folk-rock sound with progressive jazz, world music percussion, tastefully executed synthesizer loops and even a little rap on the opening track. If Cockburn has always played with the right hand of a folk artist and the left hand of a jazz musician, then his collaboration with pianist Andy Milne on this album, has given the left hand an influence beyond the guitar to the compositional process itself. While many of the tracks on the album have a decidedly jazz feel to them, "Everywhere Dance" has all the markings of what could well become a jazz classic. Here is Cockburn the...