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Ultimately, despite all the things that are different between men and women, when you get down to the core of it, we're all the same. We realize we're not alone out there, and that's really what the songs all come down to.
-Michael Timmins
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Crimson leaves slowly falling
From azure October skies
Time to kill our children
And sing about it
Margo Timmins by Jutta Brandt |
The latest release is built around two darkly hued originals and a set of perfectly chosen cover tunes that includes an acoustic-tinged version of U2's "One," Richie Havens' "Handouts In The Rain," traditional tunes "No More" and "Two Soldiers," and inspired readings of Bruce Springsteen's "Brothers Under The Bridge" and George Harrison's "Isn't It A Pity." Throughout their career, the Cowboy Junkies have proven themselves brilliant interpreters. In fact, it was a sensual take on the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" off the critically lauded The Trinity Sessions (1988) that first brought them widespread attention. It introduced mainstream audiences to the sultry, knowing-beyond-her-years voice of Margo Timmins, a singer who equals or betters Cassandra Wilson, Norah Jones, and Madeleine Peyroux for depths of blue nuance and soulful feeling.
Early 21st Century Blues is their first album since their debut, Whites Off Earth Now!, to primarily feature covers. Timmins explains, "It's two-fold. One was we'd just come off touring the One Soul Now album, and I wasn't prepared to sit down and write new material. At the same time, we wanted to get together, record, do something as a band. It was the middle of the winter, and we'd been off the road for a few months and we'd talked about doing something in the winter. So the inspiration and motivation to write new music lyrically wasn't there. And the other side was we had a couple originals sitting around that we used on the album, which suggested the theme. We were already doing 'Isn't It A Pity' as a cover, which again reflected the theme."
Cowboy Junkies |
That theme - announced in the beautifully smudged peace symbol painted on the cover by pseudonymous-sounding Xiu B. Doo – skirts the tone of '60s anti-war records but avoids being heavy-handed by choosing songs with real world complications and ambivalences. When asked about the risks of doing a project with such an explicit agenda, Timmins says, "(That old way) doesn't work anymore. It's become clichéd at this point. It worked back then and was very effective, but now, if you take too anti-war a stance and paint things as too black & white, then people just don't respond. There's just too much out there, too many messages being thrown at us, and we're a bit too sophisticated now in the way we listen to and interpret things."
Like much of Timmins' catalog, the material mixes the dark and the light so they coexist, opposites integral to one another, which is reflective of nearly every major spiritual tradition in case anyone bothered to notice.
Cowboy Junkies |
"I was raised in a Catholic family," Timmins tells us. "We weren't that strongly Catholic, but we definitely went to church every Sunday. My first four years in school were taught by nuns, and I'm amazed at how zapped into my life it all is. It's just there. It's in my genetic code (laughs). I have no connection to it now and it actually makes me mad when I think about it, but all those teachings are still there. There's a lot of good to it, too, but they really do get you young and ram it home. It's in there, and it affects everything I do. It affects how I deal with the world and how I react to it. I see a lot of darkness in the Catholic Church, but there's also so much beautiful metaphor and a lot of good life rules."
Using other folk's tunes allows Timmins to really shine as guitarist, something he always does, but he's especially subtle and tactile on their new one. His style is a smoldering mix of blues menace and jazz dexterity - Bill Frisell possessed by R.L. Burnside or John Scofield channeling Mike Bloomfield. Seated on stage, his playing is a force of nature that blows through a hall and stills all conversation. Frequently, the vocal line and guitar line are strikingly different, separated in a way that makes you pay more attention to both. Without hyperbole, Timmins is simply one of the finest pickers of the past 20 years and holds his own against anything the 20th Century threw down.
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