Catching Up With... Cowboy Junkies

Cowboy Junkies released their debut album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, in 1986. More than two decades later, they're still looking for ways to challenge themselves as artists and hold their own in the ever-evolving music industry. The band's most recent release, Renmin Park, is the first installment in a four-album series to be released over the next 18 months. A love letter to people and places songwriter/guitarist Michael Timmins (brother of bassist Peter and vocalist Margo) met while living with his family in China for several months, it combines ambient sounds he recorded abroad with the band's signature alt-country style—and it will soon be followed by a collection of Vic Chesnutt covers, a new album of all-new Junkies material and a fourth installment they've yet to flesh out. Paste recently talked with Toronto-based Timmins to learn more about Renmin Park, his time in China and the ups and downs of being a fully-D.I.Y. band.

Paste: Tell me about the concept of releasing four albums in 18 months. How did you guys come up with that idea?
Timmins: We kind of stumbled into it. For the last year or so we’ve been trying to figure out what we want to do for our next record—what direction we want to go in. These days we tend to think very conceptually, so we were just trying to focus the direction for the next album. We had so many directions we wanted to go in and things we wanted to do as far as recording was concerned, and we were having a tough time doing that, so we kept on going through all these different configurations on what we could do. Finally, we just stumbled on this idea. … Rather than trying to eliminate stuff and just do one album, let’s try and focus this energy over the course of 18 months and do four records. When we started it everybody kind of got excited about the idea and we just liked the challenge of it—just the challenge of attempting to do it. That’s really how it came about. It was really just a matter of lots of ideas floating around. Also, we had the ability to do it. It’s not the sort of thing you can do if you had any sort of contractual obligations to anybody because they wouldn’t want that much volume coming at them. But we figured—we’re open, we’re free, we’ve been doing this a long time, let’s try something different and try and challenge ourselves.

We haven’t had a major label for over 10 years now, but the last few years we’ve had licensing deals, which are not nearly as restrictive as a major label. But still, you have a licenser so there are certain limitations put on what you can do because of their needs. We don’t even have that right now. We’re doing everything ourselves as far as all the distribution, our individual deals. We’ve been [running our label] by ourselves for a long time. There’s really no restriction as to what we put out there at this point.

Paste: What has that process been like? What are some of the challenges that you didn’t foresee and what are some of the benefits you’ve already realized?
Timmins: The benefit is obviously the absolute, complete artistic freedom. I mean, we can do whatever we want. That’s never been a huge problem with us, even with the majors. There are some underlying limitations on what you can and can’t do. … We’ve heard some horror stories of other bands on majors and we never had those, but that’s the idea. The benefits are you don’t have to take into account your licensery. You can just do what you want. The negatives are that it’s just tons of work. It’s non-stop work, really.

Paste: With the latest album, Renmin Park, I read that you used a lot of ambient recordings and found sounds that you recorded whenever you were in China. Can you tell me a little bit about how you collected those sounds and what the process of integrating those into the album was like?
Timmins: Well, the process of collecting them was very simple. It was exactly like carrying a camera and photographing things that look interesting to you. I was carrying a recorder, so I just recorded things that sounded interesting to me. So anything that sounded unique or different or I thought was unusual sounding I would record. … The way we incorporated those into the album was that I then sort of narrowed the recordings that I thought would be useful in some way, or would be interesting to another listener, and then I sent them off to my friend—our friend—Joby Baker. He’s a musician and a producer and engineer who lives out on the West Coast of Canada. And, also, our bass player lives out there, Alan Anton. So I sent to it to them and they then took some of these sounds and incorporated them into … a format which he could then create musical structures on top of them. … Then me and Pete, our drummer, worked on them and sort of added more stuff to them. I wrote lyrics to them and Margo sang them, so that was sort of the way the process worked.

Paste: “Sir Francis Bacon at the Net” is a song that stands out to me. Can you tell me what inspired that song? What was the process of writing it like?
Timmins: The interesting thing about a lot of these songs is all of the songs incorporate some sort of loop so that I wrote all the lyrics and the music was finished before I wrote the lyrics. Which is unusual way for me to go about writing lyrics. So I had these structures and then … I had to let the music and the loops sort of feed the structures, or feed the lyrics, which is kind of an interesting way of doing it. That record, all the songs on the album, deal with my trip to China—my stay in China with my family. Two of my kids are adopted from China so … within the album there are songs about that—about their lives and about who they are and where they come from. Then there are also songs about people we met in China, and there’s also songs about a broader view, a more outsider’s view of China and the taste we got of it from the people we met. So “Francis Bacon” kind of falls into that zone where I met a lot of people there who were in the older generation, oddly enough. There were a couple of people there, in particular, who kind of befriended me because they spoke some English—that was probably one of the reasons. They were interested in making contact with an outsider. (Laughs) These men were in their 70s and 80s and they had lived through an amazing period in Chinese history. All of them had been a member of the Communist PLA, the People’s Liberation Army. They’d fought in various wars … and they’d also been persecuted because they were alive during the Cultural Revolution, One of them had even spent 16 years in a prison camp. They had these amazing lives and they kind of let me into … the way they view the world. That song is kind of about the predilection to violence, really. Especially the last hundred years, [China has] been phenomenally violent inwardly towards their own population, and towards each other. They’ve had revolutions and they’ve had these amazing purges and then they’ve had huge man-made famines and it’s just an amazingly violent century that they’ve gone through. Now, here they are sitting as one of the most prosperous countries in the world and one of the strongest countries in the world economically. So, really, that song is kind of about that, about the uncertainty of the future of China.

Paste: What made you decide to take the trip to China?
Timmins: As I said, I have two kids who are adopted from there, so we’ve always had a plan of getting back to China to sort of introduce them to where they come from. I think it’s important and it’s something a lot of us take for granted. You could do like a two-week trip and go to the orphanages and then go to Beijing and then you go home, but we just felt like that wouldn’t do it justice. Three months didn’t do it justice either, but at least this way, what happened is, my wife got a job teaching English so the school put us up at the school. We had a home base and … we built a little bit of a community around us. We were in a small town and we were the only Westerners in this town so we were … there was a lot of interest in us. (Laughs) We really got to meet a lot of people and we got a real taste of the place. We had to do our grocery shopping at the local market and we had to go buy our socks at the local mall—it was really something. We really attempted to integrate as much as we could into the town. It really gave us a much more true, honest sense of modern China. Then from there we did a lot of traveling and we were able to go to my daughter’s villages and check out where they came from. It just gave them more of a sense of the place and where they came from, that was the main reason to do it.

Paste: What were some of the experiences you had in China that made you want to make this album based on your time there?
Timmins: The corny thing was—you know, but I think it’s so true—was the people there. We met a lot of people, but a handful who made us feel very, very welcome and helped us out so much. ... They invited us into their homes and we met their families and had dinners with them. We spent weekends with them in the park. So that side of it was amazing. I think in those situations you make friends that you would never make anywhere else because you are in need, and you need people to help you out. It was quite amazing. This album is kind of, in a way, a nod to them—this web of people that we met. It made it a very true and real experience and that’s, I think, why an album came out of it. There were real human experiences involved, not just a tourist thing.

Paste: Could you explain what the next three albums are going to be like and when you think they might be released?
Timmins: Well, the next record is an album of Vic Chesnutt songs. … Our plan is to get it released at least through our website by October—that’s the idea. Finish it in September and get it out in October. When it will be in stores I don’t know, but it will definitely be able through our site. The third record is kind of still up in the air. It’s called Sing in my Meadow, we know that. We know the titles of these things, but … that one’s still a little bit up in the air. And then the fourth one is called The Wilderness and it’s a collection of new material. Before we even began work on Renmin Park, I was doing a lot of writing and we were even introducing a lot of songs live on stage so those songs were kind of on the backburner while we worked on Renmin Park. We’ll bring them forward again for the final record, which will be a collection of new material. Again, I don’t know how they link conceptually yet, but that’s what that one will be. So really, the only one that’s kind of in flux right now is the third one, Sing in My Meadow. The second one, the [Vic Chesnutt] songs, that record will be called Demons.