Cowboy Junkies

Toronto

Cowboy Junkies formed in Toronto in 1985 around three siblings, Margo, Michael and Peter Timmins, and the bassist Alan Anton. Anton and Michael had been friends since kindergarten, and they had already made very different music: the post-punk Hunger Project, which toured the United States and Britain, and Germinal, an improvisational band in London that released two albums, Germinal 1 and Din. Back in Toronto they rented a house, insulated the tiny garage and began exploring a new direction, with Peter on drums. Margo was drafted in to sing, and Michael felt a female voice was what the band needed. She said, "I never wanted to be a musician or be onstage."

The quiet sound came from necessity. At their first jam a neighbor called the police, so they learned to play with less volume. Their first show was at the Beverley Tavern on 7 November 1985. Peter Moore was in the audience.

One microphone

Moore had bought a Calrec ambisonic microphone, and in June 1986 the band turned its garage into a studio. The result, Whites Off Earth Now!!, was mostly blues covers with a single original, Take Me. No label would take it, so they revived Latent Recordings, the imprint Michael and Anton had used before, and released it themselves in October 1986.

For the follow-up they wanted a room with natural reverb, and Moore suggested the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto. To win over the church officials, the band said they were the Timmins Family Singers recording a Christmas special. On 27 November 1987, circled around one microphone, they recorded The Trinity Session, recording the sparest arrangements first and building to the fuller ones. Moore later said he had been angry that music had gotten into drum machines and MIDI.

Latent released it in early 1988, and RCA reissued it worldwide on 15 November 1988 with two more songs from the same session. It reached 26 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum in Canada in 1989 and in the United States in 1996. The band's cover of Sweet Jane became its best-known recording. Rolling Stone gave the album four stars, the Los Angeles Times placed it among the ten best albums of 1988, and the band appeared on Saturday Night Live in February 1989 and on The Tonight Show in June 1990. Pitchfork ranked it 42nd among the best albums of the 1980s in 2002.

I was angry that music had gotten into drum machines and MIDI.

Peter Moore

After the church

The next record, The Caution Horses (1990), took three attempts. A first session in a small docklands studio went badly, the Sharon Temple north of Toronto proved hard to record in, and the album was finally cut at Eastern Studios in Toronto in December 1989. It brought the band more radio play, though critics said it had given up some of its distinctive style. The Sharon tapes came out as Sharon in 2022.

Townes Van Zandt toured with the band in 1990, wrote Cowboy Junkies Lament for them, and received Townes' Blues in return on Black Eyed Man (1992), an album of different players and perspectives on each song. Pale Sun, Crescent Moon (1993) was their last new album for RCA. Lay It Down (1996), their first for Geffen, was written on a remote island and recorded in Athens, Georgia, and was their best-selling album since the church. Geffen dropped them in 1999, and they went back to releasing records on Latent.

Revisiting

In November 2006 the band returned to the church to remake the album with Natalie Merchant, Ryan Adams and Vic Chesnutt, released in 2007 as Trinity Revisited. Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner called it a re-enactment rather than a reinterpretation, though he praised Chesnutt and Adams. The band played the original album in order at Massey Hall on 23 February 2008. The Nomad Series followed from 2010 to 2012, including Demons, a tribute to Chesnutt.

The band entered the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015 and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2019. Moore died on 11 November 2023, and a celebration of his life was held in the church on 25 November. Sweet Jane was heard again in the final episode of Stranger Things, and in 2026 the band announced Open to Beauty, a collection drawn from its 21st century albums.