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All In The Family
08/14/1998 6:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Matt Ashare
It's been 12 years since three Toronto siblings and their friend took the name Cowboy Junkies and began recasting fragments of American folk, country and blues into a unique brand of sparsely-arranged, soft-focus pop. Much has changed in the music world since singer Margo, guitarist/ songwriter Michael and drummer Peter Timmins and bassist Alan Anton released their first album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, but for the most part the Junkies have stayed put on their own private island, all but untouched by the sea changes of alternative rock, punk, ska and techno.
There have been minor alterations along the way, as the skeletal folk of the band's first three albums gave way to the more rounded rock of 1992's Black Eyed Man, which in turn inspired Michael to add a little guitar feedback to the mix on 1993's Pale Sun, Crescent Moon. The band's new album, Miles From Our Home, offers a few subtle new twists on the Cowboy Junkies formula--namely more polished production values. But what remains most striking about Cowboy Junkies is a consistency of vision that's allowed them to develop apart from general trends.
"In this industry, people like to put you in categories--they want you to fit into rock or country," reflects Margo Timmins, who's at home with her family in Toronto, keeping an eye on her two "nearly deaf" 16-year-old Shetland sheepdogs and gearing up for a tour that begins August 10. "When they don't know what to do with you, rather than trying to figure it out, they just move on. I think that's why our career has never skyrocketed. But I think it's because we have our own little area that we've been able to stay around. Our fans are loyal because they know we're going to give them our best, as opposed to what might sell. The priority is first to put out an album that the four of us love."
Miles From Our Home--the title refers to the fact that it was recorded at an old mill house outside of Toronto, literally miles from the band's homes--was partly inspired by the deaths last year of two people Margo and her brothers loved. The dedication on the inside of the CD jacket reads: "At the beginning of the year we said good-bye to a man whose passing made the world seem a little less significant, and in the summer, the passing of another brought that significance back."
"That refers to my grandfather and to Townes Van Zandt," Margo clarifies, the latter being the Texas troubadour who collaborated with Cowboy Junkies on Black Eyed Man. "When Townes died we lost something special before its time. When my grandfather died, it was a great loss, but he was 95. He died at the right age and with great dignity, which was the way he lived. And when somebody like him dies it makes you realize that there is a way of living a life, of loving the same woman for 70 years and raising a strong family. He was a special man. He was true to his beliefs and how he felt life should be lived. He didn't have any bull in him. And there are lines in the song 'Those Final Feet,' like 'There's no sense pretending what you're not because you've got to walk down every road,' that are, well, that's my granddad. He would never pretend to be anyone other than who he was."
Margo says that the experience "helped us to look at ourselves and realize how much he gave to us. As a band we've never been anything but what we are. We've always taken small steps with our music because that's what we learned, as opposed to trying stuff that was beyond us. And we stay in the kind of hotels that we can afford. We're not very flashy. We want people to like us, but if they don't, that's okay, because I don't want to force it on anybody. That's where my grandfather was coming from too."
Though "flashy" certainly wouldn't be the right way to characterize Miles From Our Home, the album--particularly the title track, with its booming drums, layered guitars and crisp vocals--is the closest the often willfully monochromatic Junkies have ever come to embracing a fuller spectrum of aural shadings. Margo attributes much of that to the band's decision to hire producer John Leckie, who previously worked with Britpoppers the Verve, Radiohead, Kula Shaker and Stone Roses.
"I think the biggest change on the new album is the way it was produced," she explains. "We used the studio more than ever before. In the past, we've always gone into the studio to capture the sounds of our guitars and voices the way they are naturally, and not to tamper with anything. This time we did tamper, we twiddled a few of those knobs. We also put the vocals up front, which we've never done before. It was a challenge for me, as a singer, because it made the band sound different to me. I tend to want to put the vocals in the background, and I'm not used to hearing them that clearly. It took me a long time to get used to it. But I like this album for that reason. It gave me a lot of challenges. It pushed me. It was hard. So when I hear it, I hear the results of a lot of effort and I'm proud of it."
Margo is also proud of the way in which Cowboy Junkies have managed to make family and band work together in a way that has eluded so many music-making siblings in the past, from the Everly and Fogerty brothers to the Knopflers, the Gallaghers, and the Jackson Five. "Having three other siblings who aren't in the band is important too, because when I'm mad at Mike I go and talk about him behind his back to my sisters. I can do that because they know Mike and they know me, and how difficult we can both be. So there is a place that I can vent, and people I can trust who have nothing to do with Cowboy Junkies. It's not like the Jackson Five, where they were all involved. And it never ceases to amaze me that here we are in our mid-thirties, when most families are so much involved in their own personal families--their own children and wives--that they don't have time to share things with each other. And yet we do. I know that's rare, so I know that we have something really special."
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