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Cowboy Junkies - Trinity Revisited (2007)

This re-interpretation of the Cowboy Junkies' seminal original 'Trinity Session' from 1988 features guests such as RyanAdams and Vic Chesnutt. A full twenty years on from the original date of recording, the band's sibling mainstays revisited the same church in which the original was captured and decided to experiment with its familiar formats. The result is 'Trinity Revisited' which, although maintaining the same track listing, has a slightly different feel. The spontaneousjam-like aspects remain, but they are given a different personality by the contributions from Adams and Chesnutt, among others. - Amazon

Track Listings

01. Mining For Gold

02. Misguided Angel

03. Blue Moon Revisited

04. I Don't Get It

05. I'm So Lonesome

06. To Love Is To Bury

07. 200 More Miles

08. Dreaming My Dreams

09. Working On A Building

10. Sweet Jane

11. Postcard Blues

12. Walking After Midnight

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On November 27, 1987, a little known band entered The Church Of The Holy Trinity in Toronto for a recording session. It was a peaceful sort of place with an atmosphere so strong you could almost feel it in your fingers. A modern shopping mall stood nearby but little else intruded on this Victorian Gothic sanctuary associated with the city’s homeless and needy.

The Cowboy Junkies spent an age moving equipment around before finally getting the sound just left for their ragbag collection of originals and covers by writers as diverse as Lou Reed and Hank Williams. Misfits, murderers, suicide victims, miners with lung disease and star-crossed lovers were all to make appearances against their backdrop of spaced-out country-blues, rock and folk.The Junkies’ raid on the American songbook combined perfectly with their songs. One track Blue Moon (Song For Elvis) even drew on their own work and the timeless standard of the same name. Coherence, serenity, great musicianship and respect for their hallowed surroundings were among qualities displayed that day by the Timmins siblings Margo (vocals), Michael (guitar, primary songwriter), Peter (drums) and bassist Alan Anton.

When the session ended, the band had no idea what they’d achieved, sparing themselves a visit to the nearest bar and preferring to go straight home. As Margo observes, it was only when her mother raved about the tape saying “your lives will never be the same again” that things began to take off.

Stunning

The resulting album is now regarded as one of the cornerstones of modern Americana. It shaped the career of The Cowboy Junkies, still going nearly 20 years on, and brought them to a far wider audience. Today, Holy Trinity Church is dwarfed on all sides by glass-encased office blocks but has been preserved as a historic building. Inside, however, little has changed.

With the anniversary approaching, the Junkies went back to the church for the risky business of filming and recording Trinity Revisited, released next week on DVD and CD. After all, how could they improve on perfection? They took some special friends along for whom the original session album meant so much — Ryan Adams, Natalie Merchant and Vic Chesnutt, fine vocal talents and great songwriters. The resulting performance was stunning, celebrating the original without attempting to re-create it and serves as the perfect older, perhaps wiser companion. Michael Timmins tells SFTW: “Walking into that church again was kind of weird. You have certain memories of it and there are photos but it seemed a lot bigger and more ornate. I think they’ve fixed it up over the 20 years. When we started to play, the amazing thing was that the sound was just the same. That brought everything back.”

The band didn’t want Trinity Revisited to be “too cheesy or nostalgic” so the guest vocalists helped their idea of bringing the project forward. “They were people we had great respect for,” he says. “And The Trinity Session meant something for them.” It’s wonderful to hear Ryan perform Michael’s song 200 More Miles in his tenderest voice, Natalie joining Margo on Misguided Angel and Vic lending his deliciously wasted vocals to Blue Moon Revisited. Michael says: “I’d never met Ryan before. We’d never worked with Natalie but I knew her from here and there. We’d done a couple of tours with Vic. “Ryan is an interesting guy, so intense, so into his music. He was 14 or 15 when The Trinity Session came out and it was a huge record in getting him going down the path he’s taken.”

The Cowboy Junkies have released many albums over the past 20 years and Michael believes the re-recording of the band’s second album acts as a “nice pause”.“It was a chance to look back with the guests, to have casual conversations about The Trinity Session. Ryan was talking about the first time he saw us live down in North Carolina in this tiny club.” I ask Michael to trace the roots of the original album. “We’d been doing a lot of touring in our little van before this recording. “We’d been listening to a lot of country music and traditional songs and those influences were seeping into our thoughts for the next record. “We began to think in terms of an American song record, so there’s Hank Williams and gospel songs and Elvis and Lou Reed. “Our originals are reflective of that as well — the good girl/bad boy song and the ‘I killed my spouse’ song. “We spent so many months just going through those back roads. We were an independent band and a lot of gigs got cancelled so we’d go down to Tupelo to see Elvis’s house or we’d go up to the Little Big Horn to see where Custer made his last stand. It all came together in that record.”

One cover attracted the most attention, the slow, spacey rendition of The Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane, Margo’s sultry croon replacing Reed’s abrasive baritone. “They were a huge band for us, especially for me and the bass player Alan, and we’d actually tried to put a version on our first album Whites Off Earth Now! So, it had been in our repertoire and it made sense to try it again in the context of the Trinity songs.”

Wind forward nearly 20 years and we can hear the reinterpretation of those songs, stunningly shot by Lamoureux Brothers Pierre and Francois between five in the afternoon and one the following morning. “We didn’t want to over-rehearse, just one rehearsal so that we knew the basic idea,” says Michael. “The actual performance was extremely spontaneous . . . really great.”

Psychedelic

He adds that “it’s a bit rockier overall, not as spacey and laidback, and there’s more psychedelic edge to some of the songs. Our attitude has changed over the years and we’ve got more confident and that comes into it, too.”

This week the band, along with Ryan, and English singer Thea Gilmore, whose extraordinary soaring vocal replaced Natalie Merchant, played The Trinity Session in full at the Royal Albert Hall, again lending the songs to a building with a special atmosphere. (It was great hearing Margo suggest that Ryan would have been her Misguided Angel if she’d known him when it was written.) The glowing performance and warm reception showed how much affection the band and their admirers still feel for these songs two decades down the line. It’s also a testament to the lasting commitment of what is essentially a family band.Michael says: “We know how to communicate with each other and fight and get over it. A lot of bands have very different personalities and that breaks them up.

“We have a common way of dealing with things and that does help. As long as we want to do it and as long as it’s fun and interesting, we will continue.”

Let’s hope The Cowboy Junkies are still around to revisit The Trinity Session in twenty years time. These timeless songs deserve nothing less.

Simon Cosyns, The Sun, 12/10/07

Although it didn't originally have anything to do with their sound, the Cowboy Junkies' name wound up seeming pretty accurate: their music was grounded in traditional country, blues, and folk, yet drifted along in a sleepy, narcotic haze that clearly bore the stamp of the Velvet Underground. The vast majority of their songs were spare and quiet, taken at lethargic tempos and filled with languid guitars and detached, ethereal vocals courtesy of Margo Timmins. Over the late '80s and '90s, the group recorded a succession of critically acclaimed albums that found favor in the alternative rock community.

The Cowboy Junkies were founded by guitarist/songwriter Michael Timmins and bassist Alan Anton (born Alan Alizojvodic), who first played together in a Toronto-based band called the Hunger Project in 1979. They later moved to the U.K. and played with an avant-garde instrumental outfit called Germinal, but eventually grew weary of the group's style and returned to Toronto in 1984. They started jamming with Timmins' brother Peter on drums, and in 1985 they recruited a vocalist in sister Margo, at the time a social worker who'd never sung publicly before.

Dubbing themselves the Cowboy Junkies simply because the name had a ring to it, they formed their own independent label, Lament, and released their debut album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, in 1986. Featuring only one original song, the album was recorded using only one microphone, and although it was initially available only in Canada, it helped them land a major-label deal with RCA. Their first widespread release was 1988's The Trinity Session, which was recorded inside Toronto's Holy Trinity church in the span of one night -- again using only one microphone. The Trinity Session became a cult hit, earning rave reviews from critics and substantial college radio airplay for tracks like "Misguided Angel" and their cover of "Sweet Jane."Now an underground sensation, the Cowboy Junkies decided to concentrate more on Michael Timmins' original material for the bigger-budget follow-up, 1989's The Caution Horses. The album didn't cause quite as much of a stir, although it helped maintain their cult fan base. 1992's even more countrified Black Eyed Man found Timmins settling more comfortably into his songwriting voice, which set the stage for 1993's Pale Sun, Crescent Moon. Hailed as their finest effort since The Trinity Session, the record bore more influence from rock and blues, and returned the Junkies to critics' darling status. However, it also proved to be their final album of new material for RCA. As the band left for Geffen, RCA issued the two-disc live compilation 200 More Miles and the best-of Studio. Meanwhile, the Junkies debuted for Geffen in 1996 with Lay It Down, a relatively high-volume effort compared to their shimmering early work.

Following 1998's Miles from Our Home, the group parted ways with Geffen and revived their own Latent label. Their first release was the 2000 live album Waltz Across America, which was initially available only through the band's website. They followed it a year later with an album of all-new material, Open. One Soul Now followed in 2004. In 2005, the group released Early 21st Century Blues, a collection of covers -- and two originals -- that dealt with "war, violence, fear, greed, ignorance and loss." Recorded in just five days, it harkened back to The Trinity Session. Later that year, the band was featured on the Beatles tribute album This Bird Has Flown, which was produced by Jim Sampas and featured various artists including the Donnas and Dar Williams. Meanwhile, the band was busy collaborating with visual artist Enrique Martinez Celaya on a commemorative art book. Released in 2006, Cowboy Junkies XX was a retrospective piece intended to celebrate the band's 20th anniversary. It featured original watercolors by Celaya, handwritten song lyrics, and photographs gathered from the bandmembers' personal collections. The band released a new album called At the End of Paths Taken in the spring of 2007.

Related:

Cowboy Junkies - The Trinity Session (1988)

Cowboy Junkies - At the End of Paths Taken (2007)

Original News:

Cowboy Junkies History

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