A Conversation with Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins – HuffPost 1.24.11

Mike Ragogna: This album seems like a counterpart to your last album Remnin Park. What is going into the process of these works?

Michael Timmins: We are in the process of creating a piece called the Nomad Series, which is a series of four albums that we’re recording and releasing over 18 months. So,Remnant Park is volume one, Demons is volume two, and we are working on volume three right now.

MR: Who came up with the concept of doing this?

MT: As a lot of things with us are, it was a group effort. We’re throwing around ideas and trying to figure out what to do for our next recording, and we had lots of ideas and lots of directions we wanted to go in. So, we were throwing back and forth this idea of doing four records in a very short time period, to challenge ourselves and to give the albums a feel that’s similar, not having the songs deal with the same issues, but certainly having a consistent feel.

MR: Very rarely do you find groups being as inventive as this.

MT: With the freedom of the Internet these days, we don’t have any major contracts with anybody, and we can sort of do what we want. So, we stretched our imaginations, and instead of doing the system of releasing a record every two or three years and then touring on that record for two or three years, we thought to just do a broader project.

MR: There seems to be a musical progression between these two albums.

MT: It’s hard for me to comment on that, we just continue to record and make music. The four volumes aren’t necessarily supposed to be going into each other, but in the idea of doing it in a short period of time, we knew that there would be a link between them, whether it be the audio, production, or the performances, we knew there would be something. It’s good to hear that your hearing something that’s attaching them.

MR: Your first album was called Whites Off Earth Now!!, one of the best titles ever. What’s the story behind that?

MT: Lots of things went into that. We stole that line from somebody, I can’t remember who…some organization that was based on the West Coast. They were saying it with tongue-in-cheek, but not really. The idea was that to solve all of Earth’s problems, you had to get the white people off the earth. The music we were doing on that record was interpretations of old blues songs, so again, we were poking fingers at ourselves. Here are these white suburban kids covering old, black, blues music. The cover itself has some horrendous pictures of ourselves, so it all kind of came together and the title made sense.

MR: Trinity Session was your second record, and it included your cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” that was an interpretation of the live version, right?

MT: Trinity Session is a live album. It’s not an album that was recorded in front of an audience, it was recorded live off the floor with one microphone–no mixing or overdubs, you just hear what you hear. That record had the “Sweet Jane” cover on it, and we got our inspiration from their ’69 live record, so that was kind of our jumping off point.

MR: You also returned to that project with Trinity Revisited, which included appearances by Ryan Adams and the late Vic Chesnutt.

MT: Yeah, and Natalie Merchant. That was our twentieth anniversary for Trinity Session, we wanted to do something to celebrate it. It was one of those sitting around sessions where we were trying to figure out what to do. It went through all of these different phases and variations. Finally, it came out to this idea of rerecording the songs with friends of ours who those songs had some meaning to their careers. We did it in a very similar type of way in a one day recording session. This time, we filmed it, so there’s a DVD, Trinity Revisited. So, that was our own personal tribute that was very special to us and to other people.

MR: Let me do the band member check up…you, Margo, Peter and Alan are all still Cowboy Junkies?

MT: Yeah, same band.

MR: What is it like making music with your family for this long, and of course, I’m including Alan Anton in that statement.

MT: You should, he basically is family and I’ve know him for 45 years. It always works for us and we’ve been in it for a long time. So, what’s it like? It’s good. It works.

MR: What would you say is the band’s biggest growth from the early days?

MT: It’s a long period in the life of a band. When we made Trinity Session, this band was only a few years old, and Margo and Pete had only just started to play music with the band. So, we formed in ’85 and we recorded Trinity Session in ’87, so we hadn’t done a whole lot as a band. But 20 or 30 years later, we’ve spent hundreds of days on the road, traveled thousands of miles, been in and out of studios, and played with a large number of people. So, I think there is a lot of growth there from a personal point of view and from everybody’s relationship with their instrument. As a band playing that long together, there’s just an intimacy in what you can do with each other and how your sound grows and connects. It’s hard to put into words. With anything, it grows with experience and with time. You can’t help but grow in 25 years of being in a band.

MR: Isn’t it true that Margo was called one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world byPeople Magazine?

MT: You’ll have to ask Margo about that.

MR: Getting back to your new album, why did you call this batch Demons?

MT: Well, this is an album of Vic Chesnutt songs. When we came up with The Nomad Series, we knew we wanted to make four albums in 18 months, though we didn’t know what exactly those albums would be. We knew we weren’t going to do four albums of completely new material, that would be just too much to write. So, we wanted one of the records to be a cover album, but with some sort of concept behind it. Cover versions have played a big part in our band’s life. You mentioned “Sweet Jane.” We’re known for doing covers and trying to bring our own stance to them. We wanted to come up with a concept for the second volume, and we were honing in on doing a cover record, but we didn’t know who to do it on and how we wanted to line it up. This was a couple of months after Vic died, and he was obviously on our minds. It came into my mind that we had to do a cover album of Vic songs, and everybody knew immediately that was what we had to do.

MR: I was lucky enough to interview him, and he was such an amazing character. When we were discussing his songs, he talked frankly about suicide and half-jokingly told me that he was just no good at it. So sad, really. I really hope other acts take a look at his catalog and similarly cover his work.

MT: Yeah, we hope so too. When you cover these songs, even if they are relatively obscure, you hope your audience goes to the original and explores it. He’s got an amazing catalog of music, and he’s very prolific.

MR: Can you share a story about Vic?

MT: We were doing a tour in the UK with him, and his record company in the UK had just released a lot of his back catalog. He was going over there to promote a new record, as well as a lot of songs on his old records. He had a bass player and drummer in tow, and he had spent a few weeks before he came over rehearsing a lot of the back catalog and getting to know it. On his way to the first gig, he turned to his bass player and said, “You are now playing drums,” and turned to his drummer and said, “You are now playing bass.” They basically went on stage like that. That was classic Vic. He wanted to throw a monkey wrench into things whenever he could just to change it up and see what came out.

MR: Do you have any advice for new artists?

MT: There are lots of different things, it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing this for any reason but the fact that you can’t help but doing it, then don’t do it. It’s too tough of a road if it’s not something that’s driving you. You have to be obsessive about it.

Transcribed by Theo Shier