It is as much a rarity as an anomaly that any credible band or musicians of any career length are known more for their cover versions than original songs, but not many bands are Canada’s Cowboy Junkies. When their debut album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, was released in 1986, it comprised mostly covers of blues songs, albeit with one significant difference: the songs were so distinctly different from the originals that some were virtually unrecognisable. Two years later, they released The Trinity Session, which featured six (out of 12) covers. From then to now – very good albums of original material notwithstanding – Cowboy Junkies have made a fine art out of interpreting other people’s songs. From The Trinity Session and 2011′s Demons (which consists entirely of Vic Chestnutt songs) to their most recent album, Songs of the Recollection (which contains nine cover versions), the band have been dedicated to rendering only the songs they feel they can do full justice to.
“Before becoming a musician,” says Cowboy Junkies’ lead singer, Margo Timmins, who is full of conversational vigour, “you can only hope you’re such a fan of music that you live and breathe your music collection. Cowboy Junkies came to songs first as fans, and when we decide to cover songs usually it’s a hard decision because if the song has had such an influence on us then it’s difficult to find anything we can bring to it. The feeling is that Bob Dylan, for example, did it his way so why bother trying to do it our way? When we approach a song and feel we can’t find our way into it, that we can’t find anything that would make it ours, we tend to change the word ‘cover’ to ‘reinterpretation’. Ultimately, that’s really what we’re trying to do. Also, because I’m singing the song, I try to approach it, to interpret it, from a female perspective, and that has to have some impact.” Numerous covers, adds Timmins, never come out of the band’s studio “because a lot of them sound like the original versions, and at the end of it we go, well, is that it? For us, reinterpreting a song has to be more than that. We don’t necessarily verbalise it, it’s more of a feeling.”
‘Interpretative work’
Does it bother her or the other band members (which include her brothers, Michael and Peter) that there is more of an emphasis on the band’s interpretative work than their original material? Only slightly, she says. “I get tired talking about the covers aspect of our output when we have new material out, but to be a band and to have any work associated with you, no matter when it came out, and that people want to talk about, is a miracle. I can’t complain about that because I know too many bands would kill to have that kind of connection.”
There is one negative aspect, she observes, and it relates to the reverence attached to The Trinity Session in general and, in particular, one of that album’s cover versions, Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane. “The album was released about 35 years ago, it’s very distinctive, and so when people think of Cowboy Junkies they think ‘quiet’. Yes, we are still relatively quiet compared to other bands, of course, but we are by no means the same band that made Trinity Session. There is still that element of what we do – acoustic sets and open space songs – but it isn’t all that we are anymore.”
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Some things remain, however, and one of those is Margo Timmins’s voice, which is the most distinctive feature of Cowboy Junkies music, across originals as much as cover versions. Prior to the band forming in 1985, she had never performed publicly; for a time, she says, the band’s early years were quite intimidating for her.
“My style has always been organic; I just keep it simple, which means the person you see on stage is me and has been all the way through. It was scary at the start; I didn’t speak much between songs and didn’t tell stories. I kept my eyes closed when I was singing and pretended I wasn’t there. As I’ve grown as a singer and a stage performer, however, I have become more and more comfortable, which has come from being older. I don’t have those youthful pressures of feeling I have to look a certain way, be a certain way, or live up to other people’s expectations, and I feel I’ve been lucky in that regard because my brothers have never forced or insisted, or even asked, that I do things differently. The stage is now somewhere I feel comfortable and contented. I still have nerves getting onto the stage but once I’m there, with my brothers beside me and an audience in front of me, I’m in a good place.”
Timmins allows that, naturally, she had different expectations of herself as a performer but that it took the best part of 10 years for her to discover that “comfortable and contented” place on stage. It began to shift from uneasiness to acceptance in 1990 when Cowboy Junkies shared a tour bus with acclaimed songwriter Townes Van Zandt, perhaps the epitome of a measured, Zen-like performer.
Terror of stage
“Touring with Townes and learning from him was wonderful. He believed that I was a singer, but at that time I didn’t, and getting encouragement from him gave me a lot of confidence. The next tour after that was with John Prine. Townes was always this idol to me, almost like a god, so I felt I couldn’t talk to him very easily, but John was an easy-going guy, and we quickly became very good friends. When we spoke about my stage anxieties, he just advised me to get out there and have some fun. The fun angle was something I had never thought of and I’m not sure why, perhaps because I had always thought of the stage as a terrifying place. That’s when it started to change for me. It was just me with no self-expectations, just doing my thing. I’m not a big personality person, I just go with what I need to do, and so doing that better reflected my character.”
If Timmins’s voice is intact from the formation of the band then so is the band itself. It is, I suggest, most unusual for a band to hold on to its full complement of original members, especially so when three of the members are siblings.
“Oh, it’s unique,” she allows, “and I think the answer, however corny it might sound, is the music. When we get together and play now there is no difference from when we did that in our 20s. There is still joy. The fear, the high expectation, has gone and now all that’s left is the connection, the feeling after a gig when you jubilantly ask yourself, what happened there? I can safely say we all have that feeling and that we all protect it.”
So no sibling rivalry, no family arguments, no stroppy walkouts? How unexciting – but wait, what’s this? When the band members start to get bad-tempered with each other, adds Timmins (“and we do, we all have our moments when we don’t want to see the same faces anymore”) whatever is in danger of breaking them is repaired because the consequences of not playing again are unthinkable. “I can’t envision my future without playing with the boys, so I don’t care how we settle any argument we might have – all I know is that we have to settle it before we go out on tour.”
It’s like a marriage, she theorises, after almost 40 years. “At the start, it’s quite complicated, and then children come along and it gets even more complicated, but when you come out the other end you know how to fight, you know how to make up, you know how to walk away from disruption, and you know how to protect your bond. Marriage becomes a spirit entity that you have to nurture, and the band is the same thing. It is something we do not want to be destroyed, and so you have to fight for that. Let’s put it this way − we breathe together a lot more easily now than we did when we were younger.”
Cowboy Junkies play Mandela Hall, Belfast, on Wednesday, November 16th, and National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Thursday, November 17th. Songs of the Recollection is out now through Latent Recordings and is also available on the usual streaming platforms
