Cowboy Junkies – Songs Of The Recollection
Proper Records – 25 March 2022
Everyone seems to be doing covers albums these days, putting their spin on other artists’ songs, the Cowboy Junkies – Margo, Michael and Peter Timmins, along with Alan Alton, also throwing their hat into the ring with ‘Songs of the Recollection‘. Some of the recordings have been previously released (partly explaining the title), and several have been featured in their live shows. As you might expect, along with some familiar choices that fit within their musical field, they’ve thrown in a couple of more off the wall selections too, opening up with a moody, spooked, hollow drums all-new reading of Bowie’s Five Years featuring Jeff Bird on electric mandolin with an echo effect on Margo’s hypnotic vocal prowl.
Fellow Canadians naturally figure. Neil Young appears twice, the songs back to back, first being Don’t Let It Bring You Down with haunted drums, squally guitars and taken at a tempo with a modicum more life than the original, followed by a gently caressed, languidly sung Love In Mind that has the air of a lazy afternoon blissed out in a hammock. Taken from ‘Neath The Covers Vol 2, another compatriot, Gordon Lightfoot, completes the Canuck triptych with a jittery walking rhythm, The Way I Feel, punctuated by Michael’s guitar solo.
First appearing on 1999’s tribute album Return Of The Grievous Angels, wonderfully at odds with the original, their five-minute plus version of Gram Parsons Ooh Las Vegas is an ominously sepulchral affair with guitar reverb and storms niggling away as Margo imagines what Patti Smith might have done with it while the band impart a Stonesy swagger subtext. Appropriately then, it’s followed by the Stones themselves, Michael on the slide with Aaron Goldstein adding pedal steel and dobro and James O’Brian on piano for No Expectations, delivered as an enervated southern blues.
The most recent selection comes from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways with a slow Texicali waltz, electric mandolin coloured six-minute I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You that, previously released on Uncut’s Dylan Revisited tribute, positively oozes romantic surrender. Having previously dedicated an entire album, Demon, to the songs of the late Vic Chesnutt, they now resurrect the slow, dry brooding Marathon, hitherto only available as a digital bonus track, Andy Maize’s harmonies haunting Margo’s ghostly lament while feedback pulses and flutters like a spectre at the feast. It ends with another resurrected track, original appearing on their 2004 ‘Neath The Covers‘ EP, their fractured take on The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds with the twin spiked guitars and dissonant, hollow percussion adding to the desolate mood of the lyrics and Margo’s intimate, whispered vocals.
Not a wholly new project then, but bringing together the four recent recordings alongside the other hard to find tracks, it’s a highly engaging stop-gap while we wait for the follow up to Ghosts.
Order Songs of the Recollection via Proper Music