By the mid-2010’s, Canadian rock legend Tom Wilson’s life was already pretty epic: he had perfected his blue collar roots rock sound in his bands Blackie and The Rodeo Kings and his seminal 90’s outfit Junkhouse. He was a home-grown rock and roller with humble Hamilton, Ontario roots. In addition to his musical output, he had overcome addiction, he was a father, grandfather and painter. However, his life completely changed when, by chance, he discovered he had been adopted and that he was actually of full blood Mohawk descent and not Irish like he was raised to believe. His birth-mother was actually a “cousin” of his, who had been forced into Canada’s cruel residential schools. The people he thought were his parents, had actually been his great aunt and uncle. At 53 years old, his world was about to get 100% more wild.
Ever since then, Tom has been on a path to identity. He’s written a memoir, made a documentary, an album as his musical alter-ego Lee Harvey Osmond and his latest project, collaborating with fellow Canadian, the Cree-Métis musician iskwē | ᐃᐢᑫᐧᐤ. Tom’s new mission at this point in his life is to tell his story. “Our greatest job as storytellers is to open up the door to the next person and let them know they can tell their stories, too.”
Mariel Buckley considered calling her new record Sad All the Time, named after one of the B-sides of what eventually became Everywhere I Used to Be, out now on Birthday Cake Records. She laughs to think of it now, recalling her realization that it might be off-putting: “No one’s gonna listen to that. Other depressives and that’s it.”
The thing is, Buckley doesn’t need to be so literal when her smoky voice, a bit of gorgeous pedal steel, and plenty of synth so masterfully convey the deep longing and heartache heard on Everywhere I Used to Be. Growing up playing music in the prairies of Calgary and working at a local record shop exposed her to songwriters as beloved as John Prine and Lucinda Williams, and kept her rooted in her own local music community.
“There’s a great community up here,” she says, noting fellow Canadian artists like Kacy and Clayton, banjoist Amy Nelson, Del Barber, and Kathleen Edwards, among others. “It feels small, but still very mighty.”
Buckley’s second album journeys through the bleak scenery of dusty dives, churches with neon crosses, strip malls and supermarket parking lots, cheap motels, and the ever-unforgiving endless highway. She writes with an intense focus on the details, the dirty floors and the coffee cups filled with cigarette butts, always with an underlying sense of nostalgia for the way things were, and always with a solid hook. Envisioned as a true pop country record, Buckley’s stamp on the genre has been years in the making and producer Marcus Paquin was up for the challenge of spinning her somber, introspective tunes into undeniably catchy earworms. Her country roots show themselves in her storytelling (and the occasional waltz), and her rich, husky tone brings levity to the moments of despair she so vividly captures.
Though she is reticent to call the new record an arrival of herself as a fully realized artist, she is coming into her own with Everywhere I Used to Be, showing up unapologetically herself and stepping out of the shadows and into the light.
BGS: This album sounds big, from your vocals to these progressive pop melodies. Was that what you were going for when writing these songs?
Buckley: I started out pretty traditional country, so I don’t know if it’s so much … a vision, as much as these songs really leaned in that direction melodically. And then once we got in the studio and I knew I wanted to make, for lack of a better term, an actually good pop country record — once we started throwing those ideas around, it became a big sonic thing that I don’t think I really anticipated prior because I write everything out with just a guitar and my voice. Pop music is without a doubt the most influential and interesting kind of music and I wanted to do [it] properly and not digitally with the banjo running through 24 effects. I just wanted to honor it a little bit. I love traditional country songwriting, and I think that’s what I write. And then how they come out and how they’re arranged is always really fun, but I do just write Patsy Cline songs over and over. I’m not doing anything new.
What is your relationship to bluegrass music, if any?
Certainly in the east coast part of my family there was lots of Christian kitchen jam bluegrass that happened, and in my years of touring and listening to music, I’m a big Tony Rice fan. I love bluegrass and definitely have a strong appreciation for it. Weirdly I was listening to a ton of it when I was writing just because I find instrumental bluegrass great to help me formulate ideas. So it was there, though not present sonically on the album.
Marcus Paquin is known for working with artists like Arcade Fire and The National. How did working with him come about and how did he help steer the record?
That was an intentional choice. I was just rifling through records he had made and was like, “This would be so cool to make a country record with this guy who probably doesn’t listen to country at all.” We had an easy relationship hookup. He’s such a cool, big-brained music nerd, and he’s got a million ideas at once. His frenetic energy was so great to work with, so energetic and so exciting and inspiring. When we would chase ideas, he was just so positive that it became a lot more of an environment where I wanted to try new stuff as opposed to being kind of curmudgeonly.
There’re a couple songs where I don’t play any guitar which is, for me, a totally weird vibe, I just feel naked. “Whatever Helps You” is a drum machine, a bass pedal steel and like, forty synths. I was really challenged by that because it’s a bizarre feeling to be like, “I’m not in charge of the melody and when it’s going where,” but he definitely had a lot of confidence in me just as a singer to follow that. Another one was “Shooting at the Moon.” I had it pinned maybe 10 BPMs slower than it ended up being and he was like, “Maybe this is a rocker, we could push it!” He was great that way.
Your songs paint these landscapes of dreary, desolate places, but you contrast them with these really pretty, driving melodies. That juxtaposition perfectly captures the complexities of appreciating your roots and where you come from, but also feeling disillusioned by it all.
You totally nailed it. This place I’m from out in the prairies here can be quite conservative and difficult to be a member of if you’re a little bit (or a lot a bit) different. It’s a double-edged sword because I’m so nostalgic for this place … but obviously it’s been really tough. For me—and I’m sure everyone says this—the song thing is like a catharsis. Those melodies and that hope is a very genuine part of the content. I know that I’ve experienced some of that dark shit I’m writing about, but there is a glimmer of hope no matter where you’re from. That’s what I try and look for even when I’m painting the really dark stuff. I try to leave a little bit of hope in there with my voice.
Especially up here where there’s not as many people, it’s pretty spread out, but the amount of times that I’ve wanted to move to Vancouver or Toronto to have a semblance of a community of any kind… If everyone just runs away to Victoria and builds their dream home, there’s a lot fewer of us that are staying for all the kids that are going into school and have to deal with all the same shit we had to deal with several generations after the fact. I think it’s very important to stay rooted in a community that was difficult for you because you can be the person that you needed for someone else.
How did you stay hopeful yourself when you’re revisiting the difficult stuff and the heartbreak?
Getting that out on paper is very empowering, I think. When I feel like I can write more songs like that, or more songs that can speak to people in whatever way that happens to be, that’s the marker for me that keeps me hopeful, is knowing that people are gonna see themselves a little bit in these songs. Over the course of writing [Everywhere I Used to Be], I’ve learned that as much as it is like, diary rock, and I’m certainly self-obsessed, the best part is when someone really connects with that and brings it to you. That gives me so much hope and inspiration to keep writing and keep trying. It’s the whole act of releasing the record. Now it’s not mine anymore, it’s for other people.
You’ve described yourself as feeling like an outsider, and in “Shooting at the Moon” you sing about wanting to be the underdog. What does that mean to you in terms of identity?
It’s really just such an apt description for how I’ve felt my whole life. Growing up in such a conservative part of the world and being such a unique, weird kid that just wanted to shave my head and not go to school, it kind of became a part of me for better and for worse. There are parts of that I’m trying to let go of the older I get because the world is not always against you and trying to keep you down… But there’s also great power and for me, it’s hugely motivating to be second place or to be reaching for a thing because when you’re underrepresented, it’s a huge win to get to those places as somebody that is already at a disadvantage. It is my biggest motivator.
We go track by track on Canadian-born New Zealand feminist trouble maker and country music superstar Tami Neilson’s fifth album, Kingmaker. Recorded at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios, the songs of Kingmaker expose industry systems, exploding patriarchal structures of the industry, society and family. It’s definitely not new territory for Tami — her previous two albums called attention to misogyny and patriarchal structures. She digs into these themes with sophistication, grace, emotion and humor. The way she brings these important messages to life hits you hard, but you can also dance to it.
This is Tami’s second appearance on the podcast (she was first on episode 79). Definitely check out our first conversation as we talk about her life in her family band, her move to New Zealand and her relationship to fashion and appearance. She also talked about experiencing the death of her father, musician Ron Neilson. He appears on Kingmaker in several forms. For instance, on the song “Beyond the Stars,” written with Delaney Davidson, she sings about the loss and the longing to be with him again, with the legendary Willie Nelson singing the part of Tami’s dad.
Tami’s one in a million! Enjoy this conversation and her brilliant new album, Kingmaker.
Artist:Mallory Johnson & Twin Kennedy Hometown: Conception Bay South, Newfoundland & Labrador and Powell River, BC Song: “Wise Woman”
In Their Words: “Immediately after we finished writing ‘Wise Woman’, we could visualize the music video. Although we knew it would be ambitious, we believed it was important to feature as many women’s stories as we could in three and a half minutes. We also wanted to feature leaders who have inspired us, raised us, and helped shape us into the women we are today. Our mothers are in the video, our sisters, our nieces, our friends, our mentors. This video is not about Mallory Johnson and Twin Kennedy in the spotlight singing a pretty song. It’s about the message, the conversation and the women.” — Mallory Johnson & Twin Kennedy
Editor’s note: Tunesday Tuesday is changing slightly in 2021. What began in 2017 as a bi-weekly tune feature and short review will now be expanded into a monthly roundup of interesting, engaging, and groundbreaking instrumental music and the themes we trace within it.
One of the most thoughtful and virtuosic clawhammer banjoists around, Allison de Groot (Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, The Goodbye Girls) has released a brand new video with fellow Canadian, guitarist Quinn Bachand. The two old-time musicians found themselves with free time hunkering down on British Columbia’s coast last fall and joined together on a gorgeous rendering of a couple of tunes — not rousing old-time or bluegrass fiddle melodies, though. Instead they chose a pair of Irish jigs: “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone.”
“I love working up fiddle tunes outside of the American old-time repertoire,” de Groot relays via email. She arranges old-time and bluegrass with a striking, clean precision and unmatched rhythmic pocket for a frailing banjo player — facets of her playing style which might not seem to lend themselves to the often staccato or triplet-heavy or frenetic flurries of licks and trills in Irish music.
“When I’m playing in a new style,” she goes on, “I try to capture aspects of what makes the music special to my ear while still embracing the unique qualities of clawhammer banjo.” And on “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone,” she does just that, impeccably so. De Groot is a player that at times can perfectly disappear into her source material, but her obvious embrace of clawhammer’s idiosyncrasies is what makes these Irish forays so entrancing.
“Adapting jigs to the five-string banjo is not a historically new endeavour, but there is lots of room to explore clawhammer banjo in this setting. I find a lot of freedom in that space!” That freedom is perhaps the most charming aspect of this set of tunes — second only to the joy always apparent in de Groot’s picking.
Though perceptibly rare, other banjo players have indeed been enticed by that very same freedom (de Groot is right that it’s not a new endeavor). The five-string banjo, especially post-Earl Scruggs, is an instrument with intrinsic qualities of innovation, acrobatics, and thinking outside the box. The physical instrument itself and the lore driving the mystique behind it lend it perfectly to Irish and Celtic folk music.
Ron Block, longtime member of Alison Krauss’s band, Union Station, and an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, has long been an acolyte of five-string Irish banjo. On a 2018 duo release with Irish songwriter and picker Damien O’Kane entitled Banjophony, the pair explore not just the mind-bending beauty created by a five-string banjo’s interpretations of traditional Irish musical vocabularies, but also the ways in which the five-string and four-string instruments bump into each other — often delightfully — in these contexts. The linear-laid-out four-string banjo and the more bouncy, melodic five-string each naturally settle into their roles in this dialogue, like old-time and bluegrass’s primordial band structure of fiddle and banjo, but with more aggression and dissonance — and a heavy dose of the stark sort of beauty that grows from the spine-tingling friction between such gregarious and bold instruments.
Irish music fully embraced the banjo — the four-string iteration of the instrument, most often tuned in fourths (C, G, D, A) — by the mid-twentieth century, closing a transatlantic feedback loop that began in Africa, landed the banjo’s precursors in the Americas brought by enslaved Africans, and then transported the instrument in its modern form back across the Atlantic to Ireland. This conclusion occurred after the four-string banjo (and any/all banjos with varying counts of strings) skyrocketed to the height of fame in America’s popular music of choice throughout the nineteenth century: minstrelsy.
Its punchy volume, its bubbly, single-string triplets, the low buzzing of the wound strings were each folded into the greater sound of Irish folk so naturally, from the purest traditional instances to the most daring punk affectations. The banjo’s subversive, trailblazing tendencies are ripe for exciting forays and experiments. One such experiment is banjo player, builder, and inventor Tom Saffell’s behemoth Infinity 8-String Banjo.
In this 2007 video with acoustic Irish-bluegrass band Plaidgrass, Saffell demonstrates how the Infinity 8-String Banjo combines Irish banjo approaches on both four-string and five-string instruments. The two lower, wound strings, while droning or being picked, round out the natural high-end of five-string banjos, bringing in some of the punch and gravel we know and love in Irish banjo. Meanwhile, the higher strings — with one additional above the typical D first string — equip Saffell to efficiently execute Irish turns of phrase with a simple bluegrass roll of the right hand.
Whatever it is about Irish banjo playing that just works, these pickers demonstrate there’s an entire world to be discovered not just in other genres that may be seen as outside of the norm for our instruments, but even more so in the space created between those genres. That’s as close to a definition of American roots music as we might get, the “melting pot” quality we all know and love, evident and flamboyant in each of these examples of Irish banjo on more than four strings.
After an extended break due to burnout and depression, Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards at last returned in 2020 with a long-awaited collection of new material, Total Freedom. Her first release since 2012, it’s an effortless return to her usual pace, with songs that remind listeners of her many peak moments since her 2003 debut, Failer. Edwards began a “working sabbatical” in 2014, during which she rediscovered old passions and kindled new creative flames. In a trailer for the album she explains, “Total freedom is having a dog. Total freedom is liking coffee and then opening a coffee shop. Total freedom is getting older. Total freedom is not worrying about what’s happening tomorrow.”
These various concepts helped Edwards reapproach music with a fresh perspective and an eager spirit, not to mention that the songs coming out of those creative detours are of the highest order. In November, she offered a concert film (shot in 2018) titled Live at Massey Hall, capping a comeback of critical acclaim from Rolling Stone and NPR. Total Freedom also led Edwards and her band to CBS Saturday Sessions. Enjoy their performance of “Options Open.”
Sometimes self-exploration doesn’t yield the answers we seek. For those patient enough to keep prodding, the real truths emerge in the process, rather than the culmination of examining who we are. Kaia Kater learned as much on her third album, Grenades, which stretches across generations, hemispheres, and textures, and left the singer-songwriter “swimming in her own shadow.”
Born in Canada, Kater grew up hearing about her father’s life in Grenada before he fled at age 14 when the United States invaded the small island country in 1983. As a result, a part of her always existed in a land that lay far away. With the banjo as her guiding force on Grenades, Kater strings a tightrope between her Canadian sense of self and her Grenadian heritage, in order to find a balance between those two poles.
Why did it feel like the right time not only to turn inwards, but to seek a connection back through the generations?
I think it was a multitude of things. I’d been two years out of school, and I found I had more time and space. I’d also had more conversations with my dad, and at a certain point he was like, “You’ve got to go back. You can’t keep putting it off. You’ve got to do it.” I came to agree with him. What started this whole thing is last Christmas I interviewed him in the basement of his house about growing up in Grenada and coming to Canada as a refugee.
And at the age of 14.
I know! It’s kind of crazy. I was 24 at the time I was interviewing him, so just to think about where I was at 14 — it’s kind of terrifying to think about becoming an adult that quickly. It’s kind of unbelievable. But he didn’t really talk about it a lot. I think that’s the thing, people do extraordinary things in order to lead very normal lives.
That’s a beautiful way to put it.
Yes, it’s the story of immigration and the story of refugees. I don’t think my dad ever hid his story, but I don’t think he ever thought it was an extraordinary story. He thought it was his path on the way to doing what he wants to.
It’s fantastic, then, that in addition to fitting your own voice into this musical genealogy you were able to include his voice three times on this album.
Those were from those interviews at Christmas. So much of the music and the emotion was born from that conversation that it felt like an imperative for me to include them. They were not only contextualizing the music, but they were also serving as these light posts for a pretty complicated storyline.
You’ve described Grenades as a lifeline to the South, and yet you grew up in the North. North and South have long existed as such stark dichotomies. Do you think, speaking about your identity, reconciliation is possible, or have you come to accept that there will always be a tension?
I do think it’s like being a hyphenated Canadian. I think there’s a certain cognitive dissonance that happens. This album is really great because it’s given me the space and the time to start to talk to more first and second generation Canadians about “What does being Canadian mean?” In comparison to Grenada, which is 95 percent black, Canada is a multi-ethnic place. It is richer for that. We acknowledge the richness that comes with diversity, but I think it also creates these problems of identity.
I have a friend whose parents are Ghanaian. She’s black and she grew up going to a Ghanaian church in Toronto, and then she went back to Ghana after she got her journalism degree. She was faced with this thing of like, “I have Ghanaian roots, but there’s a part of me that…my accent and the words I use are very Canadian.” I feel a little bit all over the place. Even the nature of exploring all these things is how I feel about it, which is like, I haven’t particularly arrived to a conclusion.
Nor should you. That’s the beauty of any creative form—it allows you to keep exploring. Turning to the album itself, you said you wrote the songs across winter and summer?
I started writing this album really in earnest after I’d had that conversation with my dad at Christmas. Then I went to Grenada in April, and obviously it’s very warm and it’s very beautiful, so it did feel, more than the natural course of the seasons in Canada, like I went suddenly from winter — this gray March — to summer. That’s why I feel it as this change between seasons, but also like we’ve been talking about, it’s a change in hemisphere too.
When it came time to stitch those halves together, what was the process like?
I challenged myself to write all original music on this album. I knew that in order to do that, I would have to push myself and get really analytical with my work. Just changing my environment and going to Grenada was a great help because it brought out different words and melodies and expressions. If all the songs were color-coded in my head, and one is blue for winter and yellow for summer, I can see them that way.
Of the arrangements on the entire album the three that most stand out are “Canyonland,” “The Right One,” and “Poets Be Buried.” Speaking of the latter, the beautiful slow-burn brass is exquisite. How did that unfold?
At this point, I should really credit my wonderful producer, Erin Costello. She is an artist herself; she’s actually releasing a record right around the same time as me. Keyboard is her main instrument, so she works mainly in R&B and soul, but she dabbled a lot in electronic music, and has a Master’s in composition. I feel like her musical tastes are really broad, and she really doesn’t shy away from a challenge, which is why I enjoyed working with her. And it’s also nice to be working with a woman.
I was going to say!
So many of them are men, so it’s nice to have a change of energy. She lives in Halifax. We recorded the album in Toronto, and the next day we flew to Halifax with the hard drive and mixed it there. I’d expressed that “Poets Be Buried” needed something more, and so the brass was actually the last musical piece that we added to the entire album before we mixed it. It was amazing. She had these players come in for an afternoon, and she wrote up the parts in 15 minutes. It sounded beautiful. It’s just French horn and trombone.
If you had to define the banjo’s power as an instrument and storyteller, what would it be?
The banjo has a very ancient quality, and I think especially when it’s played percussively like the clawhammer style, it can bring you into this trancelike, dreamlike state. I’ve found that with traditional music a lot, especially in a jam situation. It’s everybody playing the melody and chording all of the time — it’s not solo-based. When you’re in a jam, you get this trancelike quality where you’re playing this A/B pattern 50 or 60 times. I think the banjo lends itself well to this trance of storytelling. It brings me this inner peace that’s pretty indescribable. I think that’s why I was so attracted to it and why I’ve written on it for so many years.
I read that you play two or three banjos, but your grandpa made one for you?
Yeah, I’m looking at it now on my wall.
If we’re talking about generations, and how your new album encompasses all these different stories, that connection to your grandfather brings it to a whole other visceral level.
I hadn’t thought about that; that is a good point. It’s funny, at the risk of sounding too cheesy, it’s been a guiding light in my life. It’s opened the doors to so many things — not only studying in Appalachia, but also writing things that I may have been too scared to say openly. It’s a really beautiful instrument and a powerful one.
In the liner notes, you remark, “Here’s to swimming in your own shadow.” In dealing with your father’s voice and other generations, how did you create the space for your voice in the midst of intertwining these other narratives?
I think I still am. In the same way when we were talking about northern and southern hemispheres, I think that’s an ever-evolving question for me. For a long time, I’ve had an existential anxiety about having two sides to my family who both have very strong people and very strong narratives, and thinking, “Where do I fit in this picture?” That’s why I create albums, so I can give myself the time and space to explore that.
I’ve put Grenades out, and now I’m going to get to know what it’s about. The “swimming in your own shadow” thing is about getting comfortable essentially with being uncomfortable, and with having a lot of conflicting narratives, and trauma that comes from war or from being biracial, or from being a woman in the world, which people are really starting to talk about. It’s my own way of dealing with that. The album is me carving out that space for myself.
It sounds like the start of a horror movie. A husband and father packs up the car with some clothes and a few guitars, bids farewell to his wife and kids, then drives deep into the Canadian countryside. He bunks at a friend’s country retreat, isolated from society, miles from the nearest human being. Or is he? Cue footsteps in the night, a dead bird on the doorstep, a shadowy figure barely glimpsed at the window. Perhaps there’s a death cult searching for the lost city of Ziox. Or some maniac with a pickaxe. Or some unnamed evil haunting the forest.
“It’s exactly like a horror movie!” laughs Michael Timmins, who is the man in that scenario and who write songs and plays guitar for the veteran Toronto band Cowboy Junkies. To pen tunes for their sixteenth studio album, All That Reckoning, he had to get out where nobody could hear him scream. “When I write, I have to be writing full time. As the years have gone by, it’s gotten harder and harder to do that, because I have more and more responsibilities at home. So I have to get away where it’s quiet, where I can sit around and think about nothing but songs. I have to get my head into it, so I have to isolate myself completely.”
He made it out alive, of course, but if All That Reckoning is any indication, the real horrors are the ones he encountered once he returned to society. An angry album whose outrage simmers coolly just beneath the surface, a thorny collection that ranks among the band’s best efforts, it chronicles a period of alienation, disappointment, fear, and paranoia. The guitars lurch and grind, the rhythm section lays out chunky, funky grooves, and singer Margo Timmins spits her brother’s lyrics with a strident combination of disgust and compassion. This is the Junkies in punk mode, decrying the hate and hostility that are scarier than any boogeyman.
“I’m not a protest writer,” says Michael, “but there are times in one’s life when the two collide. When I was all alone writing this album, I began to realize that the personal songs are little political analogies, and the ones that are a little bit political are really personal analogies. One feeds the other, and you really see how they cross. I felt like I was taking stock of what’s going on in my life and in the Western world, thinking about having to pay the price for a few things.”
Cowboy Junkies don’t usually traffic in dissent or social commentary; they’re better at documenting the personal than the political. Over the last thirty years they’ve crafted a sprawling body of work whose main subject is their own lives, their sons and daughters and wives and husbands and brothers and sisters. The band is rooted in their everyday lives, such that it feels more like an extension of family than a profession. “Margo and I are basically the same age,” says Michael. “We’re only about a year apart in age. We have our separate lives and things we go through, but when I write about something, she can relate that to something that’s happening in her world. And then she’s able to relate it to the listener by singing it, by giving it voice.”
It wasn’t always that way. After brief tenures in a punk group called the Hunger Project and an improvisational act known as Germinal, Michael Timmins and bass player Alan Anton returned home to Toronto, where they started a new band and eventually persuaded Margo to join as singer. Early shows were wildly spontaneous, with the band laying down a groove over which she would improvise lyrics or sing snatches of other songs. They covered old blues songs by Bukka White and Robert Johnson; they played “State Trooper” like Springsteen was an old bluesman himself. Released in 1986, their debut, Whites Off Earth Now!!, was a modest success, further entrenching them in the Canadian alternative scene but doing little to break them south of the border.
“Before anybody was listening,” says Margo, “we were just playing for ourselves—like all bands. You start in the garage or the basement or wherever, and playing music is fun. So you do a rock song. And then you do a country song, and then you do a blues songs. Nobody cares because nobody’s there.”
For their follow-up, they booked time in Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, claiming to be a Christian vocal band to allay any suspicions of sacrilege or heresy. The band recorded around a single microphone, capturing an ambience so strong, so distinctive, so immersive that the church becomes a member of the band. They reimagined “Blue Moon” as a eulogy for Elvis Presley, reinterpreted Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” as an anthem of urban paranoia, and most famously recorded what Lou Reed declared to be his favorite cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane.”The Trinity Session sounded unlike anything else at the time, and it pointed in new directions roots and folk music might travel: lo-fi, place-specific, history-steeped, atmospheric yet conceptual, beautiful and weird.
“What happens is you have any album like The Trinity Session and then suddenly everybody wants you to sound like that forever,” says Margo. “They want you to do that quiet album again and again. And we just couldn’t do that. We knew it would kill us. We’d get bored really fast, and it would be the end of the Junkies. We did it the way we wanted to do it, and we’re still here.”
After the misstep of 1990’s The Caution Horses—a little too clean, a little too slick—Cowboy Junkies proved themselves a deeply curious and extremely experimental band, one that had much greater range that previous releases had hinted. Black Eyed Man from 1992 is their country record, featuring songs rooted in Southern experience, some written by Townes Van Zandt (including a lovely version of “To Live Is to Fly”). They followed it up in 1993 with Pale Sun, Crescent Moon, a lowdown and occasionally abrasive album featuring guitarwork from J Mascis. There can’t be much overlap between John Prine and Dinosaur Jr, but the Junkies made it sound like a natural progression.
Since then they’ve largely forged their own path, never fully embracing or embraced by the roots community but also never feted as a major postpunk influence. Their most recent albums have been a linked quartet of experimental releases based on seasons of the year: One record was based on Michael’s experiences living in China, another gathered eleven Vic Chesnutt covers. Cowboy Junkies have reached a point where they can exist well outside the trends and slipstreams of contemporary pop, indie, and roots music, where they become a scene in and of themselves. Perhaps more crucially they’ve shown how a band might settle into a long career, enjoying a cult audience more than hit albums. They’ve shown how to make a life in music.
In that regard All That Reckoning is all the more surprising for how relevant it sounds, for how well it surveys our current climate, most crucially for how it suggests that the band’s defining traits—the quiet vocals, the erratic guitars, the menacing midtempo jams—are specifically calibrated to speak to this very moment. As Margo sings on “When We Arrive”: “Everything unsure, everything unstable.”
It’s not easy to write about these topics, but it can be even harder to sing about them. Before she even records her first notes, Margo road tests her brother’s songs, playing them in front of audiences, living with them so she can burrow into them, figure them out, and devise a plan of attack. For All That Reckoning she set up a makeshift studio in the ski chalet where Michael wrote the songs. “Often I don’t know what a song is about, and Mike won’t tell me. When he writes them, he just writes them. They’re mine to interpret and bring my life to and figure my way around.”
She has always been an imaginative singer, but these songs contain some of her best and most precise performances. The disgust in her voice on “Missing Children” is palpable, as is the disdain on “Shining Teeth,” but she sings “The Things We Do to Each Other” as matter-of-factly as possible, as though the lyrics were self-evident, as though a little compassion might help the lesson go down easier.
“Mountain Stream” plays like a record skipping, Michael’s guitar jangling like a pocketful of ill-gotten coins and Margo sounding hazy even though she’s relating a very grounded story about a king surveying his crumbling kingdom. “I wanted to sing it like… you know when you have a dream and you wake up the next morning and you tell somebody about it? You’re telling it in that kind of confused, almost stilted way of talking? You’re shaking your head going, I was here and I was there and then this dog came along. I wanted to sing it in that bewildered sort of way. But it eluded me. I don’t think I got it.”
Perhaps not getting it, perhaps hitting just off the mark, is what gives the song its haunted quality, as though nothing quite lines up, nothing quite makes sense. Everything unstable, everything unsure. “There’s something weird out there, something undefinable,” says Michael, pinpointing the album’s appeal. “We can’t really define it or figure it out, but it’s been out there forever, and for some reason it seems to be getting more common, more present.” The Junkies stare it down on All That Reckoning and they never flinch.
Photo credit: Heather Pollock
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