Bruce Cockburn Cover - Tokyo

From the great 1980 album Humans.

Known comments by Bruce Cockburn about this song, by date:

1980
"The song Tokyo is no attempt at giving a fair or objective portrait of that city. But it does describe some things that I saw and felt. And I find in a place like Japan I get particularly sensitized to other people; because you are so dependent on them. When we go to Japan we are illiterate. You can't read a street sign, you can't read subway directions or anything. The Japanese, of course, are extremely hospitable also so they kind of encourage that feeling of dependency and because of that my emotions were always right on the surface...any emotion that dealt with people. And so when we passed by this accident scene it was particularly shocking."

- from the RCA "Special Radio Series" LP, Volume Two (1980).

1990
"Wrote these words on the plane home from the second tour of Japan. I wanted the guitar part to sound like The Cars."

- from "Rumours of Glory 1980-1990" (songbook), edited by Arthur McGregor, OFC Publications, Ottawa, 1990.

3 April 1992
[Of the time when Humans was being composed, Cockburn noted,]

"There's a certain style of song that started to show up, and became more typical of my songwriting through that period [Humans] , which is a kind of documentary-style thing, structured like a little movie. 'Tokyo' is like that - it was one of the earliest ones - where you try and set up these little scenes that relate to each other but where you don't have to explain the relationship but there's an impression that's created out of it that adds up to something."

- from "Bruce Cockburn - A Burning Light and All the Rest" by William Ruhlmann, Goldmine magazine,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gXtuV50c38