Cowboy Junkies to play Trinity Session in Atlanta

By Alan Sculley

For the AJC

There is no shortage of Cowboy Junkies music to explore after more than 25 years and some 20 albums.

And there’s no better primer for the band’s music than the Nomad Series, four albums the band released over the last two years that showcases distinct facets of its music.

“We are known for a very focused sort of thing, which is the quiet, hushed side of what we do, which I think is a very important side of who we are,” guitarist Michael Timmins said. “But ….We do have a multi-faceted personality as a band.”

The idea for the first Nomad album, 2010’s “Renmin Park,” grew out of a three-month trip Timmins took to China in 2008 with his wife and the two daughters they adopted from there.

While there, Timmins made street recordings as he explored his surroundings. He had an idea to work with musician Joby Baker, using the recordings of Chinese street musicians, children and a host of other sounds on the album.

“I told him I want you to start creating loops with these,” Timmins said. “Don’t make it too defined because I want to write around them.…So it was really a different way of writing a record, and that’s how we focused the album.”

For the second album, “Demons,” released in February 2011, the band toyed with the idea of doing a covers album. Then Vic Chesnutt, the acclaimed singer-songwriter who had toured with Cowboy Junkies, died on Christmas day 2009 from an overdose of muscle relaxers. The group decided “Demons” should be a collection of Chesnutt covers.

“Of all the people to cover, when you listen to Vic’s material, you don’t immediately think ‘Oh, I can do that,’ because it’s so particular to him, his writing, the way he sings, his vocal style, his production style. Like everything he does is very unique and very Vic,” Timmins said.

But to the surprise of Timmins and his bandmates – including siblings Margo (vocals) and Peter (drums) and bassist Alan Anton – once the band started working on the songs, they came together quickly.

Next came, “Sing in My Meadow,” released in October 2011. In concert, the band is known to jam on certain songs, showing a bluesy, psychedelic side to its sound that had never been represented on its studio albums. “Sing In My Meadow” was a chance to make an album in that vein.

“Our one sort of note to everybody was don’t stop. Everybody go full on. Just go,” Timmins said. “Listen to each other, but play hard or play loud or whatever. That’s really the way we approached it, sort of like an open-ended jam, but with a little bit of structure involved.”

Finally, came“The Wilderness,” released last March. Realizing the first three albums focused on lesser-known facets of the Cowboy Junkies, the band returned to its familiar folky acoustic-based sound on “The Wilderness.”

Material from the Nomad Series make up the first set of a two-set evening in the band’s current tour. In many cities, the second set features songs from across the rest of the band’s catalog

In Atlanta, though, the Cowboy Junkies are doing something special – performing all of its groundbreaking “The Trinity Session” album during the second set. Atlanta, Timmins said, has long been a special place for the band.

“In the early days, when we were first touring our first album (“Whites Off Earth Now!!”) and getting the material together for what became ‘Trinity Session,’ Atlanta was an extremely important city,” he said. “We played the Metroplex. I doubt it’s still around. [the downtown club closed in the late 1980s]. We played that many times to nobody, and actually we met quite a few people in Atlanta, and Athens as well. We’d always make it a stop because if we didn’t have shows, we could stay at their houses. It was just a nice central place for us.”