Customer Reviews

Three Moments of Love In Leonard Cohen and Bruce Cockburn

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I have often wondered how no one has written a book before about Bruce Cockburn considering the consistently amazing quality of his work over the last 3 decades. If you are looking forward to this one like I was, let me do you a favor: Save your money and wait for Bruce book # 2. I read the book more for the Cockburn content than the Cohen. I am only familiar with Leonard Cohen's last couple of albums (I found "The Future" to be excellent), but I have been an avid Bruce fan for the better part of two decades. About two thirds of the book is devoted to Bruce (and I will devote my comments to that). I found the book completely disappointing. The first problem is that Nonnekes deals strictly with the lyrics completely apart from the music. There is absolutely no discussion of the performances (in the studio or live), the passion and manner of delivery. There is also no context of Bruce's known feelings from interviews, comments at shows, etc. It is as if Nonnekes wrote the entire book by just reading Cockburn lyrics and was unaware of Bruce's performance or comments about any of these lyrics. Nonnekes takes a scholarly approach that will put off most readers. I consider myself to be of at least average intelligence (I enjoyed Michael Gray's 900 page Dylan commentary Song and Dance Man 3) but I was bored by Nonneke's over-analysis of songs that often speak for themselves. Also, I personally found much of the analysis to be way off the mark of anything I have ever gotten from Bruce's work myself or from his own comments. A book like this should illuminate an artist's work, but there are few revelations here.