By: | http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/29/torontos-cowboy-junkies-take-long-way-home-their-f-ar-1730295/
Published: February 29, 2012
Published: February 29, 2012
Who: Cowboy Junkies
When: March 3, 7 p.m.
Where: The Jefferson Theater, 110 East Main St., Charlottesville
Tickets: $35 in advance, $37 at the door
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| FOUR x FOUR : Cowboy Junkies are touring on not one but 4 new CDs |
The typical routine for a successful songwriter has, for decades, looked something like this: Spend about a year writing a dozen or so tunes; record the pick of the litter with or without accompaniment; release them on an album; and then, if all goes well, head out on the road to promote the new material. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. . .
It's really not bad work if you can get it. And Michael Timmins, resident songwriter/guitarist in the Toronto-based folk-rock group Cowboy Junkies, had been getting it for a solid two decades before hit something of a wall in 2008. In league with his sister Margo (vocals), his brother Peter (drums), and bassist Alan Anton, he'd delivered a dozen albums in just over 20 years when, as he explained over the phone from Toronto just a few weeks before embarking on tour that brings them to the Jefferson in Charlottesville on March 3, he just didn't feel ready to jump back in.
"I started working on songs for a new album," he recalls, "just going through the cycle where you write, put out a record, record it, and then you have to live with it for two years. We were also in the middle of touring, and I just wasn't hearing an album there. It wasn't so much the songs as it was my feelings about having to do the whole cycle again. I just wasn't ready, so I was having trouble of getting into the right headspace."
Fate intervened: Timmins, who'd adopted two Chinese orphans with his wife, found himself jolted out of the bandlife, living in a small town outside of Shanghai for three months. "My wife was offered a job teaching English over there," he says. "And we thought it would be a great opportunity for our kids to go back and emmerse themselves in the culture."
Timmins also experienced a cultural emersion of sorts; he returned to Toronto, and to Cowboy Junkies reinvigorated as a songwriter and determined to incorporate the sounds of the Far East into his own music. The result wasn't just one new album, but a collection of four diverging discs released as "The Nomad Series" over the course of 18 months, culminating recently with the release of The Wilderness, a spare and wistful album that features half a dozen of the tunes Timmins started writing before the China trip.
With its gently restrained arrangements, contemplative tone, and an organic feel that places Margo's nuanced vocals front and center, The Wilderness is the one that sounds, well, pretty much the way you'd expect a Cowboy Junkies album to sound. In contrast, Remnin Park, the first in the series, is the quirkiest, blending samples of music and chatter from the streets of China into country-tinged acoustic ballads, electric rockers, and even a tasteful little electronica excursion. The band dedicated the second "Nomad" recording, Demons, to covering the late Vic Chesnutt, re-imagining the Georgia-bred singer's often skeletal songs with bold guitar riffs, muscular backbeats, a heap of Highway 61 Revisited organ embellishments, and, of course, Margo's sultry yet stern voice. And on the series' third disc, Sing In My Meadows, the Brothers Timmins are fully plugged in, as they rock their way through 8 extended blue-based jams outfitted with serrated slide guitars, crashing cymbals, and plenty of extended soloing.
It's a lot of music to take in, and a lot of songs to sort through as the band prepare to hit the road. But Timmins isn't worried. Here's more of what he had to say about genesis of "The Nomad Series," the impact of his China trip, and the general state of Cowboy Junkies affairs. . .
Q: I get that your time in China inspired you to take your songwriting in a new direction, but how did that lead to a series of albums that are so very different, and that essentially took right back to where you began in 2009?
When I went off to China, my whole perspective changed. I had all this music from China and I just felt that it had to influence the next thing we did. I couldn't just ignore it. So that's really when we began to think in terms of how do we do this? There was lots of stuff happening, and we just had to figure out how to incorporate all of that into an album project. The Wilderness songs just weren't feeling right to me at the time. There was just too much other input coming in. So we came up with the idea of the "Nomad" project. We started with an album based on my China experiences. That allowed me to put the songs I'd been working on for The Wilderness away for a almost two years. After that, I was able to hear them with fresh ears, and get more of a direction for them. And, also, with the four albums, it just made sense to me that this was going to be an album about the songs — about songwriting and about singing. It's more folk driven, and it's more of a nod to our older style, which is fine in the context of four albums. Now I like The Wilderness. But first, there were other things we wanted to express and get out musically as a band.
Q: I know you were close with Vic Chesnutt and had even collaborated with him, but was Demons a way for you to take a break from songwriting?
Maybe a little bit. The other aspect of it is that we've done a ton of covers. And our best known song, "Sweet Jane," is a cover. We're kind of known for that — taking songs and transforming them into something different and that's ours. We don't play them note-for-note. We try to get inside them and turn them around and figure out how to do the song in our own style. It was the same with Vic's songs. It just made sense for us to play into the side of the band that is about doing cover songs. We knew we were taking on something that could blow up in our faces. But it was a really good challenge, and we thought that if we could pull it off it might bring more people to Vic's stuff, which was a big part of it too.
Q: Sing In My Meadows sounds like something you and your brother — and Alan — just needed to get out of your system. Am I right?
That was the intention. There's an aspect to our live performances that is encompassed in that record. As you were saying, when people hear our name, most of them probably think of an album like The Wilderness. And live, we certainly have that vibe — that spacey or spacious vibe. But, over the years, we've also developed more of an acid-blues or psychedelic side, where we'll we'll take off on certain tangents and do a lot of jamming and get a bit noisy. That's where the musicians get a chance to get their ya-yas out. With the "Nomad Series," we finally had an opportunity to really focus on that side of the band's personality. In the past, we might include a couple of songs like that on an album, but never for an entire album.
Q: So how are you planning to do all of this live?
When we toured Europe in November, we experimented with how to present it, because there is so much new material and we also want to play catalog stuff as well, not just for ourselves, but for the audience especially. So we've been doing two hour-long sets. The first is all "Nomad" material. And then we do a second set of all catalog stuff. Margo announces up front that that's what we're doing, so people can focus on the newer material without hearing songs from twenty years ago. And they're not listening to the new songs hoping that the next one is going to be one of their old favorites.
Q: Things don't always go all that well when siblings play music together. I'm thinking of the Everly Brothers, the Kinks, CCR, Dire Straits, Oasis. What's Cowboy Junkies secret for keeping the peace?
I don't know: Good parenting, I guess. It's all just speculation. Maybe one difference is that there's a sister in there. There are six kids in the family, and Margo's role has always been that of the mediator. That's maybe part of her role in the band as well. But I guess I can't really tell you why it works.
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