Now as they approach their fourth decade, The Cowboy Junkies continue to interpret songs from other artists, cover songs being a long defining element of their repertoire since their beginnings in 1986. On Songs of the Recollection, you’ll hear their unique interpretations of Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, The Cure, David Bowie, Gram Parsons, The Rolling Stones, and Vic Chestnutt. Yes, the mostly sibling unit of Michael Timmins (guitar), Margo Timmins (vocals), Peter Timmins (drums), and lifelong friend Alan Anton (bass) are still going strong, with spring and summer tours planned. As you listen to these nine, you find that the band maintains those same endearing qualities that have sustained them for these 36 years. If anything, Margo Timmins has grown more confident and dramatic in her vocals.
You hear her swell and soar on the opening David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the opening track from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a prescient song that embodies crisis, be it climate change, the pandemic, political riffs. The band builds power into Margo’s delivery, no longer the timid songstress who charmed so many but one with some passion and anger. They take Gram Parsons’ “Ooh, Las Vegas” into unrecognizable territory. While Parsons’ breezy, carefree delivery masked the darkness of the lyrics, Michael’s reverberating, feedback-drenched guitar effects and his vocal joined with his sister’s twist it ominously into a psychedelic haze. Finally, in the oft-covered Stones” “No Expectations,” we hear the band we first fell in love with, in this faithful rendition that features Michael’s slide guitar and Margo’s dreamy whispering vocal.
Like so many of their Canadian brethren in almost any genre, it seems imperative to cover Neil Young, and The Cowboy Junkies decide to double down. They bring the requisite darkness to “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” accenting it with dense power chords in a cacophonous backdrop that dissolves away for Margo’s “It’s only castles burning…” They juxtapose that with a remarkably airy and sweet version of “Love In Mind,” revealing Margo’s best-nuanced vocal. They transform folk singer Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Way I Feel” into a raucous rock workout with heavy beats and fiery guitar. Again they retreat from the dense sonics into a gentle, delicate mode on Dylan’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind (To Give Myself to You)” from his 2020 Rough and Rowdy Ways, making it by far the most recent tune covered. Margo articulates the poetic lyrics clearly over the laid-back, spare backdrop, letting this one breathe freely in a similar way to the Young love song.
As their dedicated fans know, the band built a strong friendship with the late, underappreciated singer-songwriter Vic Chestnutt, to the extent of recording an entire album of songs in tribute on 2009’s Demons. His “Marathon” is another of the spooky, atmospheric, effects-imbued ones in this set. This mysterious mode carries them out too as they reprise one from their 2004 EP Neath Your Covers with the Cure’s “Seventeen Seconds,” Michael and Peter trade ringing guitar lines and crashing percussion, receding enough for Margo’s intimate, haunting delivery of the song’s cryptic lyrics before the instrumentation continues to paint a hollow, desolate soundscape.
This is a band that has stayed true to its singular, languid, atmospheric sonic to best frame Margo Timmins’ vocals. Even when they step into denser and occasional harsher sonics, they manage to successfully retreat to this infectious comfort zone. We can’t call The Cowboy Junkies a national treasure, but an enduring, consistently strong North American treasure will do just fine.
