Kelly and I were lucky enough to see the Cowboy Junkies play this past Wednesday at the First Ontario Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines and--WOW--holy shit!
What a stellar performance.
Of course I left with a record which we're enjoying now this afternoon, this Songs of the Recollection album.
When the Cowboy Junkies released their first album in 1986, Whites Off Earth Now!!, eight of the nine songs were covers, and their second, the 1988 breakthrough hit The Trinity Session, introduced them to a larger audience with their interpretations of Lou Reed's Sweet Jane and Patsy Cline's Walkin' After Midnight. Recording other people's songs and giving them a sound of their own is deeply ingrained in the Cowboy Junkies' working method, so it's no great surprise that they've chosen to release an album devoted entirely to covers.
2022's Songs of the Recollection features five new recordings of tunes from artists they admire, along with four previously released tracks that appeared on EP's (Vic Chesnutt's Marathon and the Cure's Seventeen Seconds) or tribute albums (Gram Parsons' Ooh Las Vegas and Gordon Lightfoot's The Way I Feel). This is very much in the tradition of what we've come to expect from the Cowboy Junkies in the year 2022, and that is not at all a bad thing.
As a singer, Margo Timmins has learned to adapt her understated murmur to a wide range of moods and melodic frameworks, and she's consistently lovely here, especially in her rueful takes on David Bowie's Five Years and Neil Young's Love in Mind. Guitarist Michael Timmins has a gift for weaving expressive dissonance and electric accents into the folky vibe common to their performances, and the overdriven finale of Five Years, the sudden showers of fuzz in Neil Young's Don't Let It Bring You Down, and the reverb-enhanced feedback on Ooh Las Vegas attest to his status as an unsung hero of noise guitar.
And the rhythm section of bassist Alan Anton and drummer Peter Timmins are reliable in their excellence, knowing when to rise and fall with the mood of the songs and giving Margo and Michael just the right sort of musical support.
In many respects, the Cowboy Junkies have changed very little over the course of 35-plus years, but Songs of the Recollection presents that as a virtue. This band have maintained a creative vision that's served them beautifully, and their commitment to the power of dynamics and finding the details of a song by leaving room to ponder the details and textures has led them to write some great material and also find unexplored landscapes in the work of other tunesmiths.
Songs of the Recollection captures them doing the latter with grace and intelligence.
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