(FORTUNE Magazine) – Bruce Cockburn Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu (Rykodisc)

Ask a songwriter to name a few of her favorite colleagues, and the name Bruce Cockburn (pronounced with the "ck" silent) will come up time and time again. Cockburn is a literate, overtly political, aggressively untrendy Canadian songwriter of the old school, which is to say that he's got just a smidgen more commercial firepower than a writer of Norse epic poetry or a Navajo basket weaver. But Cockburn's tiny army of followers is fierce, and his esteem among fellow troubadours goes without question. Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu is his 25th album, so you may feel impossibly late in coming to the table, but in fact, Breakfast is a fine place to start.

This isn't one of those drab folkie affairs that you secretly dread--the hectoring six-string version of "eat your spinach." Powered along by Cockburn's clear-as-springwater voice, shimmering eddies of acoustic guitar, and a muscular percussion squad that calls to mind the soft, throbbing-vein pulse of Paul Simon's The Rhythm of the Saints, songs like "Mango," "Use Me While You Can," and "Down to the Delta" win you over by dint of their basic sense of simplicity and soul. Cockburn even revisits the old Fats Domino standby "Blueberry Hill," infusing it with a persuasive sense of predawn French Quarter languor. Breakfast in New Orleans is an album you actually want to play, not put on display.

--J.G.

ANDREW FERGUSON is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard; ALBERT MOBILIO is a freelance writer living in New York City; and JEFF GORDINIER is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly.