Bruce Cockburn on his solo guitar style, 2009

"You can make the guitar work really well if all you do is strum chords. It's a good effect, but what I do instead is try to find things for the guitar that complement what's being sung or that help support it. Sometimes it's playing the melody along with myself; at other times it's more of a moving background part. It gives the song a color that it wouldn't otherwise have. If you're playing with a band, the tendency is to let the keyboard or the horns or the lead guitar do stuff like that. But because I write these songs to play them in any context, solo or with any combination of instruments, I tend to hog all the space, play all the parts, and then anybody who plays with me has to fit around that or join me in playing those parts."

From my feature lesson with Bruce Cockburn in the July 2009 issue of Acoustic Guitar. The entire article, including guitar tab examples and several video clips from the interview, is available here. I met up with Cockburn at the offices of Universal Music in NYC in February.