After more than five decades spent building one of Canada’s most distinguished songwriting catalogs, Bruce Cockburn turns the tables on The Blood Of Others, an album devoted entirely to songs written by other people. Rather than assembling a conventional covers collection, Cockburn reaches back to the music that caught his ear before he began writing songs of his own, along with favorites that have stayed with him across the years.

The idea has been following Cockburn around since the 1980s, gradually taking shape as he collected songs connected to different periods of his life. Recorded at Colin Linden’s Pinhead Recorders in Nashville, the largely acoustic album puts Cockburn’s voice and guitar at the center, giving him plenty of room to bring his distinctive fingerstyle playing to material drawn from gospel, blues, jazz, ragtime and popular standards.

Across 15 tracks, Cockburn follows the musical trail back through his formative years. Robert Wilkins’ gospel-blues “Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down” opens the album, while Herman Hupfeld’s “As Time Goes By” reaches into the Great American Songbook. “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” reflects Cockburn’s early attraction to ragtime and jazz, and “You Belong To Me” recalls hearing Jo Stafford on the radio as a child. Elvis Presley’s arrival during Cockburn’s adolescence is represented by “That’s Alright,” another song that became part of his musical vocabulary long before his own career began.

Even the album’s title carries a personal connection. Cockburn borrowed The Blood Of Others from Simone de Beauvoir’s novel, which he read in the 1970s. Its questions about responsibility and the choices people make under oppression stayed with him, while the title itself struck him as particularly fitting for a record made entirely from other writers’ songs.

With The Blood Of Others, Cockburn offers a revealing look at the music behind the musician, tracing some of the songs, sounds and influences that helped lead him toward a remarkable career of his own.