HOME ALBUMS LINKS BIO STUFF MEDIA ARCHIVES

 

SPEECHLESS- The Instrumental Bruce Cockburn
(TND 390)

Release date: September 27, 2005

1. Foxglove
2. Train In The Rain
3. Water Into Wine
4. Elegy
5. Mistress Of Storms
6. Rouler Sa Bosse
7. Salt, Sun And Time
8. Islands In A Black Sky
9. Rise And Fall
10. Sunrise On The Mississippi
11. Kink Kong Goes To Tallahassee
12. When It's Gone It's Gone
13. Deep Lake
14. The End Of All Rivers
15. Sunwheel Dance

Cover photo: Kevin Kelly
  • A review and interview from the Worcester Telegram in the MEDIA Archives.
  • Review of Speechless by the Ottawa Citizen, in the MEDIA Archive.

Notes from the True North press kit

The new instrumentals on Speechless include the meditative "Elegy," played on the dobro and the circular "End of All Rivers." On the latter, Cockburn makes use of an echo effect that allows him to harmonize with the melody as it progresses. Another piece came about when co-producer Colin Linden wanted more blues on the album and suggested a new version of "Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long." Cockburn wasn't so sure. But he remembered a piece that had its origins in a performance in New York's Central Park, where he'd played guitar with a reading that Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler gave called "Three Ways to Die in the '50s." That evolved into the bluesy "King Kong Goes to Tallahassee."
 
The title is partly a reference to Butler, who lives not far from Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, and to Ottawa poet Bill Hawkins, who was a mentor to Cockburn in the 1960s when he first started writing songs. Says Cockburn: "Bill wrote a series of poems that featured King Kong going to various places and always getting into trouble, so the title is also something of a tribute to him."
 
"Rise and Fall," is a piece that was previously only available on the Japanese edition of 1999's Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu.