This feels like an important record to me. Not in the same way as Astral Weeks, Forever Changes or What's Going On perhaps but in its smaller way it's a ground-breaking and pioneering album. They weren't completely alone. Galaxie 500, in their slightly more leftfield manner, were slowing down independent music at the same time giving it space and blazing their own quiet trail, I'd never heard anything quite like this when it came out in 1989. It had been recorded a year and a half or so before in Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity on 27th November 1987 on a two-track recording with the band huddled around a single mic. It's a beautiful, breathy and intimate record
It's altogether a gentle document. Cowboy Junkies, neither cowboys nor junkies to the best of my knowledge, had an innate understanding of the music they were steeped in. The record consisted of five covers and five band originals. The music does sound drugged to the extent that everything is slowed to a waltz and unwinds at almost funereal pace. There's much talk about loss, loneliness and despair, but there's such warmth, love and devotion in the way they get their songs across that it's a consistently uplifting experience to listen to it.
The fact that the band are Canadians is no accident in terms of how the record sounds. There are echoes of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and The Band in the way that their perspective on the American traditions they draw on is somehow always that of outsiders. The fact that three of their members are siblings, Margo, Michael and Peter Timmins also infuses it with an easy glow of warm familiarity.
It's played on traditional instruments. There's harmonica, mandolin, fiddle, bottleneck slide guitar and accordion in addition to guitar, drums and bass. Margo Timmin's voice is a key instrument in itself, she's sensitive to the traditions they're drawing on, rooted in Country, Blues, Folk and Jazz. The record is not quite any of those things, it edges towards Rock music but it's not quite the Rock and Roll that you're used to. It shares many of the hallmarks of what came to be called Americana in time, but that genre barely existed at that point in time. You can hear echoes of the record in hundreds of records that have come out since though I'd be surprised if many of the musicians on them would openly cite Cowboy Junkies as a prime inspiration. They were a band mainly involved in an act of restoration which went against the grain of much of the music being made in the Eighties and deserve kudos for it.
The band originals slot in seamlessly with the much more famous covers they sit amongst. They cover Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Lou Reed and Patsy Cline classics but they're no faithful retreads. Each song is reinvented. They slow the songs down to their own speed and make them their own. There's a sense that they're embarked on a long, arduous journey but are sure that they will reach their destination.
The record is soaked in melancholy but the determined performance, melodic confidence and loving texture each track is wrapped in ensure it's not a particularly depressing or dirge like one. As I said, it's primarily an act of restoration. Lou Reed was delighted in their version of Loaded's, Sweet Jane, particularly as they recorded the ' heavenly wine and roses' verse that he had so resented being omitted from that record in the first place. He declared it his favourite version of the song. During this verse the album really takes flight and it's perhaps the finest moment on a very fine album.
But really, it's a finely judged record from start to finish. It's intimate and there's a loving feel to the arrangements as if it matters greatly to the band that they get it right. It's to their credit that they do because they're involved in a fine balancing act. They're in the business of casting a spell, the easiest thing of all to break if they took a wrong step. It would be easy for the songs to topple over into maudlin introspection or muso jamming. The band have sufficient new wave sensibility, and yes I do think some of this is there, to ensure each song doesn't outstay its welcome. Some songs make it to the five minute mark but none overruns to six and I think somehow this is key. No one song is allowed to become more important than any other. So it remains a whole. A unified statement.
It must be clear by this point that I'm wholly in favour of the record and am stretching sinews in the lazy manner it encourages to make its case. I was feeling slightly fraught when I started to write this about an hour ago and its songs have eased me towards a restful state. Perhaps this gin and tonic is helping too. But there's a slow, languid grace that still draws me in and helps me appreciate it twenty five years on from when I first bought and listened to it.
It wasn't typical of the records I bought at the time which were generally more upbeat and played at a considerably more urgent pace. I haven't slid particularly towards Americana and the albums and bands that picked up its cue in the preceding decades though I appreciate them. This record is still something of a one off in my collection. I took the next Cowboy Junkies record, The Caution Horses back to the shop after a couple of plays the following year although I regret that moment.
The band helped nudge me towards Hank Williams and Waylon Jennings and further towards Lou and for that I'm grateful. It's something of a pity that their fine version of Blue Moon, recorded at about the same time doesn't grace this record. Listening to The Trinity Session this evening took me back to the year I discovered it which wasn't the happiest in my life but the record itself is not self-pitying nor encouraging of that response nor is it locked in any particular time or space. In fact the opposite. It has a healing power, no doubt encouraged by the surroundings it was recorded in. Cowboy Junkies may never have made a record that resonated so deeply or gave them quite the same limelight but for me, this is enough. Play it at night.
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