Black Eyed Man

Michael Timmins wanted to play with structure, with time and tempo shifts, and Margo wanted to widen her range. Instead of one long mood, each song would have its own perspective, and the theme tying them together was love found, love lost and love betrayed, the journey of a faceless, nameless and haunted Black Eyed Man. The band recorded over several months rather than in one go, working on two or three songs at a time at Grant Avenue Studios in Hamilton. Players from earlier albums turned up alongside about twenty-five other Toronto musicians, and many songs were barely rehearsed to keep them fresh.

Townes Van Zandt had toured with the band in 1990 and wrote Cowboy Junkies Lament for them. Michael answered with Townes' Blues, and the album closes with Van Zandt's To Live Is to Fly. John Prine sings on If You Were the Woman and I Was the Man. The band had first asked Jimmie Dale Gilmore, but his voice did not mesh with Margo's. The record continues the move from the spare country blues of The Trinity Session to a more mainstream country rock.