{"id":5830,"date":"2012-04-25T09:26:18","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T16:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=5830"},"modified":"2012-04-25T09:26:18","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T16:26:18","slug":"cowboy-junkies-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2012\/04\/cowboy-junkies-2\/","title":{"rendered":"COWBOY JUNKIES"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"COWBOY JUNKIES<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Bringing a nomadic journey to a close, while looking ahead to the next\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

After more than 25 years\u00a0together, the members of Cowboy Junkies have but one goal: \u201cSurvival,\u201d says guitarist and primary songwriter Michael Timmins with a laugh. Yet their recent activities suggest broader ambition than that. Over the last 18 months the Canadian band has released a quartet of separate but linked albums dubbed The Nomad Series<\/em>. \u201cWe had a lot of ideas floating around,\u201d says Timmins. \u201cWe had too much material for one record, and we arbitrarily came up with the idea of doing four records. We didn\u2019t really know what the four records would be. We just thought it would be a good challenge\u2014and would make us focus more strongly and give the albums a certain amount of cohesiveness because they were done at around the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each volume of the series spotlights a different facet of the band. Timmins describes 2010\u2019s Renmin Park<\/em>, inspired by a trip to China to adopt two of his children, as \u201cexperimental\u201d; 2011\u2019s Demons<\/em> was a collection of Vic Chesnutt covers; and the same year\u2019s Sing in My Meadow <\/em>incorporated the band\u2019s rawer, rocking live sound. The new Nomad Series, Vol. 4: The Wilderness <\/em>finds the group returning to the folkier sound heard on early albums like 1988\u2019s platinum breakthrough The Trinity Session<\/em>. \u201cWe thought the songs I\u2019d written were much more in the tradition of some of our older material,\u201d Timmins says.<\/p>\n

In keeping with that notion, the group hewed close to Timmins\u2019 demos for The Wilderness<\/em>. \u201cTo achieve that, I laid down a guitar track I thought suited the song and then let everybody else find their way into the song through that,\u201d says Timmins, who describes the Junkies\u2019 recording process as purposefully disjointed. \u201cWe don\u2019t go in and keep recording until we finish. We\u2019ll do a song here, a bit here and then head out on tour. Some of the bits on The Wilderness<\/em> were recorded before we even came up with the idea for The Nomad Series<\/em>. We began to work on two or three songs,\u00a0then put them away.\u201d<\/p>\n

The band has every intention of sticking together through its 30th anniversary in 2015 and beyond. \u201cIf we feel like we\u2019re playing well together and we\u2019re enjoying recording and we\u2019re touring, that\u2019s about as fresh as it gets,\u201d Timmins says. \u201cI don\u2019t know what the secret is, just that we still enjoy it and still enjoy each other\u2019s \u00a0company. It\u2019s easy that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Juli Thanki<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\n<\/strong><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COWBOY JUNKIES\u00a0 Bringing a nomadic journey to a close, while looking ahead to the next\u00a0 After more than 25 years\u00a0together, the members of Cowboy Junkies have but one goal: \u201cSurvival,\u201d says guitarist and primary songwriter Michael Timmins with a laugh. Yet their recent activities suggest broader ambition than that. Over the last 18 months the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[1891,3303,10156],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5830"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5830"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5833,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5830\/revisions\/5833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}