Folk rocker Bruce Cockburn headlines Academy Theatre in May

Few recording artists are as creative and prolific as Canada’s Bruce Cockburn, who headlines Lindsay’s Academy Theatre on May 4.

Since his self-titled debut in 1970, the Canadian singer-songwriter has issued a steady stream of acclaimed albums, including Dart to the Heart and The Charity of Night. This fall he released his 33rd album, Bone on Bone.

There’s an urgency and anxious tone to much of the album, which Cockburn attributes to living in America during the Trump era. But, more than anything, Bone on Bone amounts to the deepest expression of Cockburn’s spiritual concerns to date.

The 12-time Juno winner and Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee turned away from traditional Christianity in the mid-1970s toward a quest for the more all-inclusive mysticism he documents in his memoir.

It’s that kind of spirituality that figures prominently in “Jesus Train” and “Twelve Gates to the City.” In “Looking and Waiting,” Cockburn sings of “scanning the skies for a beacon” from the divine.

Cockburn, who won the inaugural People’s Voice Award at the Folk Alliance International conference in February and was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in September, continues to find inspiration in the world around him and channel those ideas into songs.

“My job is to try and trap the spirits of things in the scratches of pen on paper and the pulling of notes out of metal,” he once noted.

More than 40 years after embarking on his singer/songwriting career, Cockburn keeps kicking at the darkness so that it might bleed daylight.

Tickets are $60 and $50 for the 7:30 pm show.

The supporting act is Nefe, a singer/songwriter from Guelph. Nefe stands to lead and empower women and men to accept their real beauty, not succumbing to the pressures of perfection defined by today’s media culture.