Beautiful Creatures
I’ve always tended to over-analyse things. It’s just part of who I am. Songs are no exception.
Lately I’ve been captured by the song “Beautiful Creatures” off of Bruce Cockburn’s latest CD. It’s a slow haunting piece with a lot of space and full of beautiful imagery - and as always gobs of passion.
“the callous and vicious things humans display”
“the ache in the spirit we label despair”
“we create what destroys, bind ourselves to betray”
The main chorus, if you could call it that, is a line that says “the beautiful creatures are going away”.
With words like that I came to see this as speaking of human beings. The beautiful side of who we are, the attributes of our existence that make us give, care and love, are fading.
However I just read an interview of Bruce Cockburn on emagazine where he says the song is a response to the extinction of species.
“The new song “Beautiful Creatures” is a response to exactly that. I look around and I see this extinction going on. Most of the species being lost are ones we don’t really notice, including tropical insects and stuff like that. But some of them are very noticeable: the polar bear, for instance, the tiger, these creatures that loom large in our imagination as storybook characters when we’re kids as symbols of power, of divinity even. And we’re killing them off. In fact, for all practical purposes, we have killed them off. It won’t be long before there’s nothing out there that can’t survive in a zoo.”
Maybe he had the animals in mind when writing the song - “Most of the species being lost are ones we don’t really notice” - then again, maybe I am more on the mark than I thought.
Is the beautiful creature who you are, going away?
