One of the more innovative bands in rock and roll is headed back to Newport. The Cowboy Junkies last played the “City by the Sea” in 2022, a follow-up to a remarkable performance at the 2008 Newport Folk Festival.
The Junkies have been making critically acclaimed music since the late 1980s, never veering far from their initial style centered around the haunting vocals of lead singer Margo Timmins. They showcase a lo-fi Americana-based sound that blends folk, blues, and rock. That cool vibe comes to Newport’s Jane Pickens Film and Event Center on Friday, February 23, at 8PM. Tickets are available here.
In the midst of the current cold snap, winter shows can be a little tricky for some bands. Not the case for these hardy Canadians. Touring in cold weather can be a challenge, but for the Junkies, it’s pretty much business as usual.
“There’s always a little trepidation, but we’ve been doing it forever,” said guitarist Michael Timmins in a recent phone interview. “You start looking at the weather reports a couple of weeks earlier to try to figure out what the drives are going to be like, especially in New England. We just keep our fingers crossed.”
Founded in Toronto in 1985, the quarter included siblings Michael Timmins on guitar, Margo Timmins on vocals, Peter Timmins on drums, and Alan Anton on bass. The band broke through to the mainstream in 1987 with two-time platinum-selling The Trinity Sessions, a masterpiece recorded around a single microphone inside Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity.
The album of covers and originals was notable for its haunting, droning sound, radically different from the typical “indie” sound of the late 80s. The Sessions yielded probably their biggest hit, a sultry cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” a song that received a lot of airplay on mainstream rock and college radio. They’ve recorded 25 albums since their debut, including originals, popular covers and deep cuts from artists including Neil Young, David Bowie and Elvis Presley.
Fast forward to 2024. The Junkies have continued to stay busy with their 2023 album Such Ferocious Beauty heralded as one of their strongest releases in years.
“We’ve been on the road a lot over the last year,” said Timmins. “We also put out The Barn Demos, an addendum to the (Ferocious Beauty) album. It’s a reproduction of my notebooks and comes with a CD of demos that Margo and I made while we were working on the songs. I rented a converted barn, a big open space, about two hours north of Toronto in the country. I’d be working on songs during the day and she’d come by in the evening and sort of go through what I’d done. I was recording all that, so we had versions of a lot of songs to bring to the band. It was kind of a cool side project.”
Timmins is the chief songwriter and guitarist in the band, crafting stories that range from deep-wrenching love songs to murder ballads. He shared a bit about the band’s songwriting process.
“It’s different from song to song,” he began. “It generally starts with me sitting there with a blank page, an acoustic guitar, and a tape recorder. I’ll hopefully have a few ideas to work on; I’ll start to record my musical and lyrical ideas on the tape recorder, and they begin to feed off each other. I generally get a song together in that form, a singer-songwriter kind of song, me and my guitar. Then I’ll bring that to Margo, and we’ll work it up, expand it from there, maybe change the key, maybe change a few lines.”
“Then the whole band gets involved,” continued Timmins. “We’ll workshop it as a four-piece and see where it goes. At that point, it either can stay where it is, very straightforward singer-songwriter with some bass and rhythm accompaniment, or it can take off in a different direction depending on what Alan and Pete bring to it and what I hear. If it’s going in a different direction, we follow it. Songs can come together really quickly like that. Or they can go on all sorts of tangents, which can take a while. Sometimes you lose them, they just go away. Sometimes, we never really find a band version that we like. You never know how long a song will take. The journey can be different.”
For a band known for its daring covers, I asked Timmins how they go about selecting and recording those.
“You have something to start with, you have the template, the original song,” he explained. “Sometimes it’s a specific project; maybe someone’s putting together a Neil Young tribute record or a Rolling Stones album. We might be participating in a concert celebrating an artist, so we put a song or two together, usually a song that we all like. Then, how do we interpret this as a band? Its often done as a four piece together, I might bring in a few ideas of how to interpret it, or someone else might. We try to bring a twist to it, sometimes we play it straight ahead, but do it Junkies style.”
Hear great songs and stories about the songs at “An Evening With the Cowboy Junkies.” Click here for tickets and more information.
