Photo courtesy of the Cowboy Junkies
Cowboy Junkies
Cowboy Junkes
Family is at the heart of Cowboy Junkies. Three of the band’s four members (Michael, Margo and Peter) are siblings. Bassist Alan Anton is the only non-Timmins (and also Michael’s childhood friend). The three are half of the six children Barbara and John Timmins brought into the world. In the past eight years, the offspring have dealt with the passing of the family matriarch in 2018, while her husband passed from Alzheimer’s Disease just as the world was shutting down because of Covid.
While the 2020 album Ghosts dealt with Barbara’s passing, pandemic restrictions gave Michael Timmins, the band’s primary songwriter, plenty of time to process John leaving this mortal coil. This creative ruminating yielded 2023’s Such Ferocious Beauty, the Cowboy Junkies’ most recent studio album. Steeped in songs about loss and mortality, this collection gave Michael Timmins an outlet for the collective grief his family was experiencing.
“Along the lines of the surge of COVID-19, I had a lot of time to sit and reflect,” he recalled in a recent interview. “My dad at that point was still alive, but he was going through dementia, and it was getting worse. With COVID-19, it was getting more difficult and harder for us to understand what was going on. We also had him at home, so we were his primary caregivers as well, which came with all the complications of that. It was a pretty intense time. That’s when [the composing] sort of began and started to germinate. I had time to sit, reflect and write, so I did a lot of writing at the time. I obviously had a lot on my mind, so that’s when it started to come together.”
Isolation Aesthetic
Isolation proved to be a primary aesthetic in helping Timmins get the creative juices flowing. To that end, he spent his time with his acoustic guitar working out of a converted barn in Grey County, Ontario. It proved to be the perfect environment for Timmins to pull his ideas together.
“I wanted to get out of the city and get some time,” he explained. “Margo lives about two hours north of the [Toronto] and there is this really cool converted barn up near her that I rented. I camped out there for a couple of months and went back and forth. I did some writing and it also allowed for me to connect with her while the writing was going on. Margo would come over because she was about 20 minutes away from this place. She’d drop by and I’d play her songs and she’d learn them. We started to put this together—the two of us. Once restrictions started getting lifted, we headed back to the studio and Pete got involved and it sort of went from there.”
This wasn’t the first time a location and its setting played a big part in shaping a Cowboy Junkies album. The group made their initial splash with their 1986 sophomore bow, The Trinity Session, which was recorded around a single microphone at Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity. A house located in Ontario’s Rock Island was the setting for 1996’s Lay It Down, while 2012’s Wilderness came about in the remote environs of a crumbling cottage near the tiny community of Creemore. For Michael Timmins, it’s an important facet of securing his muse.
“It’s really very important and not just for recording, but the writing process as well,” he said. “For me, the start of any project, when I have my acoustic guitar and either a blank piece of paper or notebook, isolation has always been a big part of it for me. It always has been, to be alone and fully focused on writing. I just allow myself a space and my mind and brain just have a chance to ruminate and go over ideas. That’s a big part of it. And then the actual recording part of it, when we get the band together—we do a lot of it (ourselves).”
Trademark Sound
That comfort infuses “Such Ferocious Beauty.” It has the trademark Cowboy Junkies sound—an ethereal ambiance shot through with Margo Timmins’ mournful croon. It’s an effective formula on songs ranging from “This is What I Lost,’ a stark ode marked by Michael Timmins’ sparse guitar chords using his late father’s perspective on his dementia via the couplets “I looked at the room/And I didn’t know where I was/Or if ever I was” to “Mike Tyson (Here It Comes),” which uses chiming plucked guitar and plodding piano to emphasize the heavyweight champion’s oft-quoted observation, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
Expect more of the same with Cowboy Junkies on the road. With 16 studio albums under their collective belts, the Junkies have the classic good problem of figuring out what to play.
“Right now, we’re a little bit removed from the release of Ferocious Beauty. It’s still our most recent record and we’re trying to play a few songs off of it, for sure. As you go along, you sort out what songs are going to find their way into your repertoire,” Timmins said. “We’re trying to touch on every era of the band.”
Cowboy Junkies perform on March 25 at Turner Hall Ballroom. Visit https://www.pabsttheatergroup.com/venue/turner-hall-ballroom/
