Midweek Music Break: Cowboy Junkies, “Angels in the Wilderness”

[Image: Cowboy Junkies (from top: Alan Anton, bass; Margo Timmins, vocals; Peter Timmins, drums; and Michael Timmins, guitar)]

Cowboy Junkies was the first band I ever listened two who’d been dubbed “alt”-anything. (It may have been alt-country, but I’m pretty sure it was plain old alternative rock.) This made me feel all, y’know, not quite dangerous, more like adventurous — life on the edge! — because I tend toward the plain-brown-wrapper end of most spectra. For starters, I couldn’t imagine ever talking to anyone I knew about a band with the word “junkies” in its name. My family and friends would wonder with whom I’d been hanging out.

In truth, I don’t remember. I may have first heard of the Junkies from a magazine, Rolling Stone maybe, in a review of their great Trinity Session album. (I’ve featured one song from that album here, a good while ago, as one of the selections in the first What’s in a Song post, about “Blue Moon.”)

Well, whatever the circumstances in which they first crossed my radar screen, Cowboy Junkies have continued for around twenty-five years to crank out whatever music they want to make, and to tour widely in its support. And they still consist of the same four members (two brothers, a sister, and a childhood friend). Most recently, they challenged themselves: write, produce, and release a series of four interconnected albums… in eighteen months. It actually took them a couple-three months longer than that, but the final piece of the Nomad Series, the album called Wilderness, finally dropped a few weeks ago.

Here’s one number from the new release, which (to me) feels very comfortably both familiar and, yes, alternative.

[Below, click Play button to begin Angels in the Wilderness. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:42 long.]

[Lyrics]

If you’re a Cowboy Junkies fan, you’ll almost certainly want to see their Tiny Desk Concert recorded at the NPR offices recently. It’s a fourteen-plus-minute session, featuring both “Angels in the Wilderness” and “Fairytale” from the new album, bracketing the one number which has come closest to a hit for them, from that Trinity Session album: “Misguided Angel.”