A folk rock-oriented set from Canadian-born artists Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Bruce Cockburn. I’m playing Young’s 1978 album Comes A Time, Mitchell’s Blue from 1971 and Cockburn’s Humans, released in 1980.
My individual album thoughts appear under each record’s song list.
Neil Young – Comes A Time
1. Goin’ Back
2. Comes A Time
3. Look Out For My Love
4. Lotta Love
5. Peace Of Mind
6. Human Highway
7. Already One
8. Field Of Opportunity
9. Motorcycle Mama
10. Four Strong Winds
An album that balances folk and country influences and is also a showcase for Nicolette Larson, Young’s harmony vocals accomplice throughout most of the album including a great performance on the lone rocker on the record, the duet Motorcycle Mama. Interestingly, Larson didn’t sing on Young’s Lotta Love, which later became one of her solo hits.
Joni Mitchell – Blue
1. All I Want
2. My Old Man
3. Little Green
4. Carey
5. Blue
6. California
7. This Flight Tonight
8. River
9. A Case Of You
10. The Last Time I Saw Richard
Likely Mitchell’s most acclaimed album, a great fusion of folk, jazz and storytelling, said by some to be arguably the most confessional singer-songwriter album ever made as she laid bare her soul during and after relationships with Graham Nash and James Taylor, among others. Hard rock band Nazareth transformed This Flight Tonight into a hit single in 1973 to the point that Mitchell, who liked their version (and, no doubt, the royalty cheques), took to introducing it in her own concerts as “a Nazareth song.”
Bruce Cockburn – Humans
1. Grim Travellers
2. Rumours Of Glory
3. More Not More
4. You Get Bigger As You Go
5. What About The Bond
6. How I Spent My Fall Vacation
7. Guerilla Betrayed
8. Tokyo
9. Fascist Architecture
10. The Rose Above The Sky
In late 2022, the American website allmusic.com did an article on Cockburn headlined ‘Canada’s Forgotten Singer-Songwriter”. Outside of Canada, at least. He’s legendary here and rightly so but in fairness, the article was positive about his work; it was merely discussing his US success, or relative lack thereof, as compared to that of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
Years before that article, I experienced that sentiment firsthand. I was living in Peace River, northern Alberta, went out west 1981-83 for my first journalism job and wound up sharing a house with several people including a woman from Washington state who was getting into Cockburn and one day approached me, marvelling at how good he was but surprised at his relative anonymity in the United States. That’s not unique to Cockburn; many artists are popular in some countries but not in others, for various reasons including the distribution and/or marketing of their albums, or have particularly passionate fan bases in one country, like Cheap Trick in Japan. In any case, she’d never heard Cockburn, or of him, nor had any of her American circle of friends, until her entry point since moving north, the Humans album. By then, I was a big fan, having gotten into Cockburn myself not much earlier, during my second-last year of college back in Ontario via his previous album, the 1979 release Dancing In The Dragon’s Jaws and its hit single Wondering Where The Lions Are.
A great artist throughout his discography with by now many perhaps universally or at least relatively well-known tunes like The Trouble With Normal, Lovers In A Dangerous Time, If I Had A Rocket Launcher and Call It Democracy , among others. But Humans, which featured the hit single Tokyo (at least in Canada) remains probably his favorite of mine, a superbly consistent release.