Digital Interviews: Which performers had an early influence on you?

Michael Timmins: My older brother introduced me to a lot of people -- early Neil Young and Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, David Bowie and all sort of late 60’s and early 70’s artists.

DI: When did you first pick up the guitar?

MT: Not until I was about 16 or 17 years old. It was just sitting around. I learned the chords, and I learned how to play by playing other people’s songs -- just sort of went from there.

DI: Tell us a little bit about the Hunger Project.

MT: That was a band that Alan, the bass player in Cowboy Junkies, and I formed in the late 70’s. The spirit of the day was more punk. It was Siouxsie and the Banshees-style music. A little bit of Joy Division in there, but that was the vibe of it. We were together two, maybe three, years. We did a lot of touring. We released a couple of singles. We worked out of New York for a year, and we even moved to London. We broke up once we moved there. But it was a first band. It’s not usual that your first band does more than that. We got a lot of experience playing in a band. It was fun, but things like that don’t last. When you’re younger, too, not everyone in the band necessarily goes on to have musical careers. It’s usually a passing thing for some people.

DI: Your next outfit was Germinal?

MT: Yes. Once we got to London, and Hunger Project broke up, Alan and I decided to form an improvisational, very experimental band. We didn’t really want to start up the same thing we’d just been in. We were looking for something a little more outside, so we formed this very loose unit of a few musicians. We got together a couple times a week and just jammed.

DI: Is that when you started the Latent label?

MT: Yes. We released two Germinal records on that. Then we released, in retrospect, a Hunger Project EP, because we had the tapes sitting around.

DI: Then you started the Cowboy Junkies.

MT: Yes. I left London and came back to Toronto. Alan came back a few months later, and we naturally got together and started playing music again. Pete, my younger brother, joined, just jamming in the garage on drums. My older brother, John, was around at the time, playing guitar. We were jamming just for the hell of it. When the music got to a certain stage, we thought we should add a vocal to it. We asked Margo to sit in. It formed very loosely. Once the garage started to sound good, we thought, “Let’s go get a gig.” We sort of went from there.

DI: And Margo didn’t sing professionally prior to joining the band, or go through any training?

MT: No. She has a natural voice. She just knows how to sing. A lot of her experience has been garnered on the job, basically. She was born with a natural gift, so she’s been able to utilize that.

DI: Did you hear her singing around the house?

MT: Yeah, and she sang in school plays growing up, things like that. She was always, of course, the lead in the school play, because she was the only one who could sing. So, we knew she had a voice, definitely.

DI: Your first album Whites Off Earth Now, was recorded in a stripped-down fashion. How long did it take and how much did it cost to record?

MT: It cost nothing to record. We recorded it in our garage, which was our rehearsal space. Peter Moore, who did the recording, also ended up doing The Trinity Sessions, as well. He was a guy on the scene, recording live gigs, and we stumbled across him that way. Our philosophies matched, and he was interested in recording us. We invited him over with his equipment, and it was just, like, “Let’s get together and see what happens.” There was really no money exchanged, and there were no other musicians except for us. It was an afternoon, six hours.

DI: And this was the same way you recorded The Trinity Sessions?

MT: Same idea. We had released Whites Off Earth Now, and we toured for about a year. We did okay with it, as far as "independents" were concerned. We got a fair amount of attention, which was nice. The stature of the band grew a little on the independent scene. Then we had material to do a new album, so we went back to Peter -- enjoyed working with him -- and he suggested this church, just to change the ambience of the sound. Whites Off Earth Now was recorded in the garage, so it’s very tight and claustrophobic sounding. He thought, if we went into the church, it would give a more ambient, ethereal sound. He had done some recording in there, some classical and jazz recording. We went in there as an experiment. We brought in a few more musicians to augment the sound, we went in there for the day, and it turned out good.

DI: You included some great covers. How did those choices come about?

MT: We did “Sweet Jane” because the Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed, was a big influence on us. The concept of The Trinity Sessions was songs and songwriting, and different types of songs. There is our own material, there are road songs like “200 More Miles,” and love songs like “Misguided Angel.” There’s “To Love Is To Bury,” which is a traditional country theme. We augmented that with other songs or performers who are important to us in that pantheon, like Hank Williams. There’s a song, which he didn’t write, and which Waylon Jennings performed, called “Dreaming My Dreams With You.” There’s a Patsy Cline song, again that she didn’t write, but it’s her signature song -- “Walking After Midnight.” It was partly bowing our heads to those people, and augmenting what we were doing, making sense of the album as a whole.

DI: How did you decide upon your spare, pure signature sound?

MT: It evolved when we were playing in our garage. As Margo was learning how to sing, we found that her vocals were much better if she sang quieter. She felt more comfortable that way. In order to do that, we brought our levels down. My older brother, John, played another guitar, and he left the band before we did any recording for the first album, almost before we got out of the garage. Once he left, we continued on as a three-piece band, with the fourth being the singer. We liked the sound. So, rather than trying to replace that and fill it in, we just left that space open. It was a combination of things. We liked what we were hearing, the sparseness and stillness of it. To us, there was an intensity there, the same intensity you get by playing very loud and very aggressively, but this was just on the other side of the edge.

DI: People feel a very personal attachment to the way you deliver the songs so sparsely.

MT: Part of being a musician in this band has always been about communicating, and getting that individual listener into the song. The lyrics are important to that, but also the way Margo delivers it is important to that. Also, the music is important, and it has to be an inviting sound. That’s always been our idea, to bring you as an individual and not as a mass collective, but that individual person sitting in the seat or sitting there with their headphones on, into our sound, and having it speak to them. Part of that has been because it’s so quiet, you really do have to sit and listen. Otherwise, it just goes over you.

DI: You really seem to enjoy touring.

MT: We’ve always toured a lot. Alan and I had the experience of being in other bands. We knew that the way to form a band, and form a sound, was to tour. That’s the best way that you can get experience as a band. We just toured all the time, up until the end of The Caution Horses tour, which was the album after The Trinity Sessions. We pretty much toured non-stop. It was a good three, four years of touring. I think that was good for us. It matured us, and made us a good performing unit.

DI: Tell us a bit about working together, and also having several siblings in the group.

MT: It’s been a very positive thing, and it’s obviously worked. We come from a large family. There are six kids in all, so we had to learn how to get along with each other when we were growing up. I think we all have a very good sense of hierarchy within the family. We also have the understanding that you need to give each other space. We have good tools for figuring out disagreements. We learned that just by growing up in a large family and learning how to survive. That’s why I think we survive [now] -- we know how to treat each other with respect. We know how to solve our arguments quickly, easily and amicably.

DI: When releasing albums, do you have some major label help, or is it all independent?

MT: Right now, it’s all independent. With the next studio record, we will get some major label help through distribution. Our studio records are important to us. Those are our statements, the stepping stones of our career. In order to get it to the people who want to buy it, and allow people to know it’s out there, you have to go through the majors. They’ve got pretty much everything tied up.

DI: Why do you only use the major labels for distribution?

MT: At this point in our career, we don’t really have to have them for any other reason. There’s a lot of energy dealing with major labels. There’s a lot of politics you have to go through. We know how to make records. We know how we want to make them, and we can do them ourselves. We don’t really need anybody in a record company to tell us how to do that. We need them to market the record and to get it into the stores. We’re quite happy to do what we do over here, and what they do over there, and we’ll join together somewhere in the middle and sell a few records.

DI: Were you more popular in Canada at first?

MT: No, the States have always been our focus, always where we’ve been the most popular. Canada followed, when The Trinity Sessions took off, and “Sweet Jane” and all that. We focused down here. Our early management was down here. The only difficulty in the early days was getting across the border, because you couldn’t get visas unless you were somebody, so we used to have to sneak across all the time. Now it’s all pretty straightforward.

DI: But you’re still based out of Canada?

MT: That’s where we live. We love Canada, it’s a great country. Our family’s there. I like the whole vibe of Canada, and Toronto’s an amazing city to live in. It’s a very big, bustling city, but it’s not nearly as intense as American cities, so it’s a good place to live.

DI: What are some of your favorite places to play?

MT: Portland is one of our favorite cities. The whole area from Northern California up the coast; Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. We really love Vancouver, as well. The Southwest we like a lot. The Northeast we like a lot, too -- Boston and New York are always fun. Chicago’s a great city, we love that. As far as Europe’s concerned, Italy’s the place to go. [laughs] If we had to tour one country forever, it would be Italy.

DI: Why is that?

MT: It’s just beautiful. The food’s fantastic. The attitude is just so relaxed. “We did all that 2000 years ago.” [laughs] “We made our contribution. We’ll just relax now, and we’ll let you people over there on the other side of the water take over.” [laughs] It’s spectacular. It’s just a beautiful place to visit. Most of Europe is fun. It’s hard touring there just because of the different cultures, but it’s exciting and it’s different. Scandinavia I love; I think it’s because there’s a Canadian connection there, as far as the landscape’s concerned.

DI: What was the thought process behind 1989’s The Caution Horses?

MT: That album was recorded by the road band that had been touring The Trinity Sessions for quite a long time, and most of those songs were written and arranged on the road. It was recorded fairly quickly, and it’s a live recording again. But it was in a studio, so we could mix it.

DI: Then you released Black Eyed Man, which has more of a country sound.

MT: That record is a storytelling album, a collection. Those songs are little vignettes in the country vein -- telling stories through songs. Lots of characters and plots. With that record, we used probably 20 or 25 musicians. It was a fun record to make. We’d go in and do a little bit of recording, and then invite friends in to put some tracks down on whatever instruments they happened to play. It was a “fly by the seat of your pants” record to make, which was a lot of fun.

DI: Pale Sun, Crescent Moon marked the end of your relationship with RCA.

MT: That was made very fast, written very quickly, and recorded very quickly. We recorded it as a five-piece band, with Ken Myhr on electric guitar. We recorded it quickly, without even thinking about it. I think it’s one of our strongest works. By the end of the tour it was obvious that our relationship with RCA was not going anywhere. We’d been with them a few years, and it was fine -- not a bad experience with RCA. They did a relatively good job, but I think by the end, we had both grown a bit too used to each other. We didn’t feel that record was properly promoted, and we worked out a compromise to get out of our deal at that point.

DI: As you continue to tour, you keep utilizing pieces from that album.

MT: It’s one of those records that slowly seeps through not just our audience’s psyche, but ours, as well. You go back to it. “Oh, yeah. That’s a really nice song.” We keep on pulling songs off it. I don’t go through every record and choose songs for our repertoire. I generally choose songs which I feel will work in a live show, and there’s quite a few on Pale Sun, Crescent Moon now in our repertoire, just coincidentally.

DI: Did the compromise with RCA include the Studio compilation and the 200 More Miles live set?

MT: The live record was fine. We wanted to do that. That was next on the agenda anyway. We went through all our tapes, and we produced and mixed that record. That was a nice documentation of our first 10 years touring, basically. The so-called “greatest hits” record, Studio, was something we didn’t want to put out, but that was part of the compromise. Since they were going to do it, we got together with them and did the actual package, so at least the audience wouldn’t get some cheap little chintzy thing that the record company did. But the idea of releasing it, we didn’t want to do. Record companies do that. They need a quick buck, so they do that.

DI: After you moved to Geffen, you released Lay It Down.

MT: That was our first record for them. The previous few records to Lay It Down, we had invited a lot of musicians in and were working with fairly big bands, and different textures. With Lay It Down, it’s much more stripped back to just the four of us. There’s a few added instruments, but generally the sound is just the four of us. That was the intention. That was a fun record to make. We went to Athens, Georgia, to do that, which was the first time we’d really been outside of Toronto to make a record. I think it’s a pretty powerful album.

DI: Then you had Miles From Our Home.

MT: That was the biggest budget we’ve ever had for a recording. [laughs] We figured, ”This will probably be the last time we’ll ever have this, so let’s see what it’s like to record a big record!” It was a lot of fun to record. We invited John Leckie in to produce it, a pretty well known English producer. He was great to work with, very laid back and very relaxed. We did most of the recording in Toronto, then we went to Abbey Road in London and did some.

DI: How was the feeling of being in Abbey Road?

MT: It was amazing. Just being there was an incredible, incredible experience. A lot of the studios are the same. You can get your Beatle book and you can match up pictures of them in the studio. It’s pretty neat. The mixing of it was a bit of a drag. We went through a few mixers. That’s where it sort of hit a bit of a hump in the road. About two-thirds of the way into recording it, Geffen started to fold, and by the time we’d released it, a month after we released it, they were absorbed into the big mega-whatever. The record was, sort of, shipped and dropped. That was a really bitter experience for us. That has been our worst experience, and it probably came at the right time in our career. It taught us. "Now you’re on your own." [laughs] "You have to carry it from here." We’re quite willing and able to do that. But it was bitter.

DI: Didn’t you end up remixing some of that album in Los Angeles with somebody else?

MT: There’s 10 songs on there, and I think there’s maybe seven songs we remixed. We weren’t happy with the mixes when we finally left John. The intention was to make a big, bright record, and their mixes weren’t bright enough. He had done great recordings, but all the textures hadn’t been brought out in the mixes, and Chris Lord-Alge in LA did that.

DI: Have all of the tribulations you’ve had recording and releasing different albums helped you focus in on the live performances?

MT: We’ve always treated both differently. Studio and live are very different animals. Over the years, live has become what we enjoy most, because it’s immediate. You do it and it’s gone, and there’s no second-guessing. A show is a show, it’s over, and you’re on to the next one, which is really nice -- to be able to redeem yourself every night. So, that’s the most fun, playing live. Studio is always a challenge. You always hit parts in studio recordings where it’s a drag. Being in a studio is work.

DI: How did the new album, Rarities, B-Sides and Slow, Sad Waltzes come about?

MT: When we left Geffen, we decided to get control of all aspects of what we do. We decided to resurrect Latent, our label that we started with way back in England. We had all these songs sitting around, which we knew a lot of our audience wanted to hear. Some of them had been released as B-Sides or on tribute albums, or whatever. Some of them were out there, but they weren’t collected. We thought we could put a good collection of music together, which would be a great way to launch our re-independence. [laughs] We also wanted to launch a Web site at the same time, and we wanted to go out on tour. Just put it all behind us and just start again. It’s nice to have a record to do that sort of thing. You can center things around it, the press can focus on something, and you can sell it at the gigs. So we just started to collect the songs up.

DI: Does taking time away from the hustle and bustle of the city motivate you to write and record?

MT: Being outside the city is great. It’s always inspiring, because we live right downtown. Maiden’s Mill was where we wrote for Miles From Our Home. Once you get outside, into the countryside, your whole mind opens up, and your perspective changes on things. If we go outside the city as a band, and rent a place, it’s just that much more tight. There’s more communication. It’s not like going to a rehearsal space, and then going home to our individual families. It’s nice to have that time where you’re just relating to each other as a band when you’re writing. You can do it all night, and you can do it whenever you feel like it. You don’t have to shut down. We always feel better if we’re just by ourselves outside of the city, and outside of the environment that we live in.

DI: How are you approaching the recording process now?

MT: With the next record, which we’ll release, hopefully, early in 2001, we’ve been recording whenever we have a couple of songs. We get two, three songs together, work them up a little bit in the rehearsal studio, then go out and tour it. Get it more formed and cohesive as a unit, then go back home and go into the studio for a couple of days and just throw it on tape, and then forget about it. Not trying to finish it, and not trying to mix it -- just sort of trying to get the essence and the dynamics and the energy of the band on tape. That’s the way we’ve been doing it so far, and it’s worked out really well. It’s sounding really good, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

DI: You also lean towards letting people share in your music by recording the concerts.

MT: We have a policy where we allow people to come in and tape. We’ve also done some recording ourselves, bringing out equipment. We plan on releasing a live record just through our Web site, a special little thing. If people are out there taping you and trading tapes back and forth, then that’s more people who are going to hear what you’re doing. Those people will come to your shows and they’ll buy a record. It just feeds on itself. And we’re out playing it anyways. [laughs] It’s not like we’re not sharing it with people, so might as well.

DI: Does that provide a challenge to differ your performances?

MT: We don’t change our set completely every night. There’s a certain focus to every tour that you want to maintain with every show. We do what we do. Our show is geared towards the audience on the night, not towards the taper, or the people who are going to hear it. If somebody wants to get, you know, 70 shows from this tour, they’re going to have a lot of repeats. [laughs]

DI: But perhaps one night a song will be laid back, and then the next night, it’ll be a real push forward.

MT: There’s definitely lots of dynamics. Any song is going to be a little different every night. From how the band’s feeling, how the audience is, the type of room you’re in…Tapers hear there’s a really good show, then they’ll try and get that one. That’s the value of it, I think, getting those really good shows captured.

DI: What is in the future?

MT: The Cowboy Junkies is always the main focus, and it’s always moving in a direction. There are times when you’ve got a little bit of space, and you can relax, or do other things. I’ve got a film score I’m going to be doing in the fall, maybe two. We’re going to release the live record through our Web site. We want to organize a real Web event, as far as a live show. We’re going to put it together in Toronto, and do a lot of interactive stuff on the day and the night of it. We’re going to try to do that in October, around the release of the live record.

DI: You have an engaging Web site.

MT: We’ve been very happy with it. We launched it a year ago, and it’s really important to us. We’ve spent a lot of time and thought on it. Thank you for that compliment. It means a lot to us, because some band sites are strictly corporate sites, and I find them as exciting as a press release. We wanted a site which was us, and which we’re involved with, which is as direct a contact with your audience as you can get. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback through the message board. You don’t want to always be listening to your audience, because then you’ll go in circles, but there are a few things that have hit home that people have mentioned, and it’s like, “That makes sense.” We’ve taken those to heart and incorporated them. It’s nice to have feedback from the people who really care about what you’re doing.

DI: What’s the live album going to be called?

MT: Waltz Across America.

DI: So has each part of the tour been a step in the waltz?

MT: Yes, we started with the Summer Waltz, then we had our Autumn Waltz, our Winter Waltz and now our Spring Waltz.

DI: It’s rare to see a group reach such a level of success as you have, yet really make an effort to continue to do things in a very homespun fashion.

MT: That’s what we’ve always done. That’s always been the fun of it, going out, especially on the road, and meeting people and getting to know the cities. Over the years we have lots of people who’ve become friends as opposed to fans. We’ll see [them] in every city and they’ll come to every show, and it’s the way we feel the most comfortable -- with that sort of attitude. It’s like, “We’re in town tonight to provide some entertainment.” That’s it. No big deal, you know. It’s nice listening to good music, and as music fans, we do the same. We appreciate it when a band comes to town to play music. There’s nothing mysterious about it. There’s no reason to put on airs about it, it’s just what we do.