This afternoon, he’s with his five-year-old daughter, Iona, and apologizes for the interruptions. People change the world and if people embrace a particular song as a kind of anthem, then that song becomes part of the process of change.”Ĭockburn is talking over the phone from a Starbucks in San Francisco, where he’s lived the last eight years and where his second wife, M.J. “I hope to write a good song and have people hear it. Ultimately, what does he hope to achieve from a political song? Very few people understand it as a call to arms.” “Most people relate to it for close to the right reasons. The Ottawa-born Cockburn wrote Rocket Launcher after visiting a refugee camp in Guatemala. These people had a different perspective on it.” “When we got to the end, the audience was on its feet. A Chilean singer repeated each line after Cockburn in Spanish. I don’t like reliving it.”Ĭockburn also appeared in Santiago, Chile, to support banned artists during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It’s truthful, but that’s not a pleasant truth to me. “There’s nothing joyful or celebratory about it. “Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be running out of war and pain.”Ĭockburn recalls the “scary” experience of playing the song for 2,000 Christians at a music festival in England in the 1980s, and everyone enthusiastically singing: “If I had a rocket launcher … some son of a bitch would die.”įor reasons like that, he is not comfortable with people singing along to the song. “A lot of people relate to it currently, in terms of Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria, any number of places,” Cockburn said in a recent interview in advance of his July 15 appearance at the Vancouver Island Music Festival in Comox. Today, the song remains as valid - and potentially misunderstood - as ever. It has been 33 years since the release of Bruce Cockburn’s darkly infectious hit, If I Had a Rocket Launcher, a stirring commentary on the injustices the Canadian singer-songwriter experienced during a visit to Central America.
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