Nearly 40 years into his solo career, Bruce Cockburn's social conscience appears to be as stimulated as it ever has been. Since taking a trip to Nicaragua in 1983 during the Sandinista revolt, Cockburn has cultivated a political edge in both his music and his continuing humanitarian work. On the latter front, Cockburn (pronounced "coe-burn") has regularly traveled on behalf of various relief efforts to severely impoverished, war-ravaged parts of the world, including Mozambique, Cambodia, Native American communities, and, in 2004, Iraq. Nonetheless, despite the world-weary anxiety underlying the music on Cockburn's latest album, 2006's "Life Short Call Now" (his 25th studio offering), the Canadian singer/songwriter has a knack for weaving distress and tenderness so that they go hand in hand. Throughout "Life Short," while the music proceeds at a lollygag pace, Cockburn nudges it along with gentle guitar strokes and images that nestle together cozily even as they intone a world falling apart. An edited transcript of Cockburn's recent chat with City follows.

City: You've only written two songs where you've come up with the music first and then added words later - the rest have all been lyrics first.

Bruce Cockburn: I know "All the Diamonds in the World" is one where the music came first, but in general the songs are lyric-driven. I have an interest in music per se, apart from words, but it always seemed to me that, if you're going to have words, then they might as well say something. And once you get on that track, the words start leading the procession. When I get a set of lyrics that's complete enough that I know what direction they're going in, then I start looking for music to carry those words. It's analogous to putting a score on a film. The music has to support other elements.

You recently said that you see layers of meaning in what you experience, and that layers are hard to get across in the space of a song. How much do you struggle with that?

It depends on how aware I am of those layers and how much I think people have to be aware of those layers to get the picture I'm trying to paint for them. With a song like "This Is Baghdad," it was frustrating because it wasn't so much a question of what to leave out, but knowing how to put it together into a picture that made any sense without including everything. You get at layers by suggestion more than by naming or carefully delineating them. By juxtaposing the images or scenes that you create, you add layers of meaning. You take a car bomb going off and you put it in the context of a sunny day, and then it's not surrounded by gloom. What I couldn't put in the song, or couldn't figure out how, was the degree to which passersby were utterly unmoved by this event. It was in the distance, but no one gave any sign that they'd even heard it.

That says a lot about people's capacity to get inured to things.

It sure does.

On the other hand, how much does seeing these types of things ever re-affirm your faith in the human condition?

It does do that. You see people rising to the occasion. At the very least, it suggests, OK, maybe I could do as well in these circumstances, and more power to them all. It's kind of reassuring in some weird way. In most of the situations that I've been in, there's something affirmative going on. Not always. The second time I was in Mozambique [in 1995] it was really depressing because it didn't seem like there was any of that. Everything was broken, every single thing. Every human and social bond. You had the sense that children didn't trust their parents and vice versa, and that everybody would sell everybody for whatever. And you couldn't blame them. But in the other places, you tend to see this resilience and sometimes, by great effort, imagination brought to bear on the difficulties at hand.

When you travel to these strained parts of the world, how much fear do you feel?

If somebody's pointing a gun at you, it's scary. If they're not, it's not. That's kind of what it boils down to. I've actually had more guns pointed at me in Italy, by cops.

How gloomy does the future seem to you?

It looks pretty damn dark, actually. I think we're going to get a die-off one way or another, whether it's a die-off or a kill-off. A lot of the stuff that's going on now is going to produce conflict. People are already fighting over water in large parts of the world, for example. That's going to intensify and complicate and aggravate other existing conflicts as well. How do you get around that? By having fewer people and more water. But we're not going to get either one of those the way we're going. So it looks dark - but not hopeless.

In my own frame of reference, I don't mind using the word "hope." I think it's a good concept that motivates people to do good things, but it's also a bit of a fantasy. We're really dealing with probabilities, and the probability is that we're in deep shit. But it's a probability, not a certainty. And even if it were a certainty, I don't think it would make much difference in how I operate. You have to try to make things better, even if you don't succeed in fixing problems. You can slow things down and, if nothing else, you at least feel like you're doing something worthwhile with your life with the time you have. [Laughs.]