Cowboy Junkies Collect Covers For Recollection Collection

Over their consistently critically-acclaimed career the Cowboy Junkies have recorded and released a bevy of eclectic covers dating back to their 1986 debut album Whites Off Earth Now!! and their ensuing signature version of Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane." The amount of covers has left fans searching high and low for tribute albums, bonus EPs, British music monthlies CD compilation inserts and beyond to get those nuggets.

Now the group have gathered some of them into one tidy nine-track album entitled Songs Of The Recollection. According to guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Michael Timmins it seemed like an apt time to release the record out March 25, 2022.

"The idea of releasing a covers record just sort of came to us," he says during a late February chat. "We have a lot of covers that are either archived or are limited released or have been released on tribute records. We had a couple we were playing live that we never recorded or never finished recording them. So we thought it was a nice bridge project between All The Reckoning (2018) and Ghosts (2020) and our next studio album which we've been working on for a while."

The album (featuring Timmins' record collection as the cover art) ranges from Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot gems to tracks by The Cure, Rolling Stones, Bowie and Bob Dylan's "I've Made Up My Mind (To Give Myself To You)."

"We did that for (British music monthly) Uncut and that was pretty straightforward, it was sort of right up our alley," Timmins says of the Dylan track. "It was a bouncy waltz that we're good at. Nothing was too difficult. I think that's why we ended up falling into these songs. They felt natural to us. Covers have to be almost like our own songs, we have to be able to bring our personality to them. Sometimes if they're too difficult it's means that we're not bringing the proper Cowboy Junkies vibe to them. Or maybe trying to push them too far from the original or play them too closely to the original. I think with cover songs you either fall into them quite naturally and become part of our repertoire or we drop them."

A fine line was the difference between Lou Reed's "Coney Island Baby" not making the cut while the David Bowie classic "Five Years" ending up on the album. Timmins says it's tough putting their own spin on cover songs but "Five Years" fell into place.

"That song is pretty close to the original as far as the structure," he says. "The drumbeat was the key, that's the centre of it. That persistent march so we kept that. And then a lot of it is up to Margo (singer Margo Timmins) to bring her own take on it. She falls into her own style so that often will bring a different spin. That one we kept fairly close to the bone but we did our own arrangement on it as far as music goes.

"That's the pressure, the pressure if you let these things out into the world that they're a proper reflection of what you wanted to do and not just, 'Well I want to do that song so here's a version of it.' You want to make sure they're really good versions especially if it's a famous song people have an attachment to.

Meanwhile Timmins says his two current personal favorites were "very thrown together" renditions of The Cure's "Seventeen Seconds" and "Marathon" penned by the late Vic Chesnutt.

"They are very live and raw," he says of both. "We probably played them once, recorded them and never played them again. I really like the weird, achy energy of those songs."

Cowboy Junkies are putting the finishing touches on a new, as-yet untitled studio album set for a fall release. The band are looking forward to hitting the road after the pandemic put things in limbo for most of the last two years. A string of North American full-capacity dates last fall served as the forerunner for similar dates this March and April.

"I guess we should have no expectations," Timmins says of the upcoming dates. "I'm looking forward to performing but I'm very anxious. The whole getting up to go and getting ready, it's a lot of work. That's the part that's right in front of me right now. It's like I really want to play but I don't want to go."

Timmins says the band -- also consisting of his siblings Margo and Peter Timmins and Alan Anton -- have endured mainly by respecting each other and not exhausting themselves.

"We enjoy it, that's a big part of it," he says. "We still really like it. We understand when things are too stressful and the negative side of being in a band and on the road takes over we need to step back. We tour all the time but we don't tour excessively. That's how you get tired or sick of it. If the traveling is hard and you overdo it then it overshadows the playing. And it seems people still want to hear us so that's good too."

Finally, Timmins mixed The Good Family Album in 2013 which features the Good Brothers as well as their offspring which made up half of The Sadies: Dallas and Travis Good. He says the death of Dallas Good is still very fresh.

"I don't think I've still processed it and I've talked to a lot of people who feel the same way," he says. "It's one of those things where you go, 'What? What? What happened?' It's hard to believe.

"On the non-personal scale it is such a loss for the Canadian music scene. Dallas and the Sadies were such an iconic example of truly independent music. Not just who they were affiliated with as a label but their attitude and how they went about their business and who they chose to play with and not play with. That's a huge loss, a huge loss."

Pre-Save Songs of The Recollection, out March 25, 2022 on Latent Recordings.