"I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were"
About this Quote
Cockburn’s memory lands like a quiet rebuttal to the myth that every great musician begins with a manifesto. He frames his origin story not in genius or destiny, but in apprenticeship: wanting to play rock and roll, full stop. The blunt repetition - “That’s all… That’s all” - does more than emphasize scarcity; it recreates a pre-auteur moment when the job was delivery, not authorship. In that world, singing was closer to craft than self-expression, and “other people’s songs” were the shared currency of a scene.
The subtext is a critique of how we now romanticize songwriting as the only real mark of authenticity. Cockburn is pointing to an era before the singer-songwriter boom rewired popular music into a confessional economy, where the person with a guitar was expected to also be the person with a diary. His phrasing suggests that songwriting wasn’t absent because people lacked imagination, but because the culture hadn’t yet assigned it the same prestige. A performer could be “real” without being original on paper.
There’s also a sly humility here. Cockburn, celebrated for his own writing, refuses the tidy narrative that his voice emerged fully formed. He implies that identity in music is often retrospective: we backfill intention (“I was always a songwriter”) into what was initially mimicry and desire. It’s a reminder that scenes create artists as much as artists create songs - and that “originality” is often a later privilege, built on years of singing someone else’s lines until you find your own.
The subtext is a critique of how we now romanticize songwriting as the only real mark of authenticity. Cockburn is pointing to an era before the singer-songwriter boom rewired popular music into a confessional economy, where the person with a guitar was expected to also be the person with a diary. His phrasing suggests that songwriting wasn’t absent because people lacked imagination, but because the culture hadn’t yet assigned it the same prestige. A performer could be “real” without being original on paper.
There’s also a sly humility here. Cockburn, celebrated for his own writing, refuses the tidy narrative that his voice emerged fully formed. He implies that identity in music is often retrospective: we backfill intention (“I was always a songwriter”) into what was initially mimicry and desire. It’s a reminder that scenes create artists as much as artists create songs - and that “originality” is often a later privilege, built on years of singing someone else’s lines until you find your own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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