Canadian singer / songwriter Bruce Cockburns twenty-second release Dart to the Heart is a musical bullseye. Producer T Bone Burnett has once again captured Cockburn's emotional guitar playing while strengthening his musical approach with a diverse cast of musicians.

Cockburn sounds like Bruce Springsteen, Mark Knophler, Robbie Robertson, and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top all wrapped up into one. The grooving "Listen for the Laugh" gets the album off to a driving start with his brand of upbeat country rock before he slows things down with the rustic, pedal steel twang of "All the Ways I Want You." However, this is not a country album. It is more of an unprententious release with the occasional dose of organs, horns, mandolins, and accordians. The instrumentation gives many of the songs an organic feel like the melodic "Burden of the Angel / Beast." The duality evident in the track's lyrics best captures CockburnŐs songwriting prowess with lines like "Kill for money / Die for love / Whatever was God thinking of?" For the most part, Dart to the Heart is a soft, organic look at the reality of love and the many moods it evokes.

Though well established in the circle of his peers, Cockburn has yet to cash in on the masses with his brand of honest, adult rock.

Though Cockburn comes across as a serious artist on many of the album's love songs, he does possess a humorous side as well, poking fun at his commercial anonymity on the disc's final track "Tie Me at the Crossroad," where he sings "Tie me at the crossroads when I die / Hang me in the wind till I get good and dry / And the kids that pass can scratch their heads and say 'who was that guy?" Cockburn may be right to an extent, but an album as musically and lyrically rich as Dart to the Heart should bring him more recognition. For an artist who releases the number of records he has for the last two decades, there may be a lot fewer kids wondering who Bruce Cockburn was than he predicts.

Reviewer:  Don Kroeller Jr., courtesy of Flash Magazine.