Bruce Cockburn on truth telling, 2003

One of the things a songwriter gets to do--I suppose it's true of any artist--is you get to take your inner feelings and fling them out at the world and say, “Here, buy this!” [laughs]. So there's a certain luxury about being a songwriter and being able to do that stuff. But it's really about sharing. On the one hand you can see it as self-indulgent to want to share things like rage or pain, but it's really in the sharing of those things that humanity improves, in a way. The laying out of truth, whatever the truth is, is a positive thing, and other people can benefit from it.

There was a guy in Sweden, for instance, who came up to me one time and told me the song of mine called "All the Diamonds in the World" had prevented him from committing suicide. The last thing I thought about when I was writing it was keeping anybody from committing suicide, including me. It was an expression of something I was feeling. But for this guy, it touched his life in some way that really changed the direction he was going in. That is a very humbling experience, and it's a good example of how the sharing works. I guess it's possible that you could influence somebody for the worse as well, and I feel a certain sense of responsibility to avoid doing that--but not at the expense of telling the truth.

Outtake from Bruce Cockburn profile on NPR's All Things Considered