Cowboy Junkies on Family, Loss & Such Ferocious Beauty

Idle hands, they say, are the devil’s workshop. So during the pandemic, Margo Timmins kept hers in constant motion, banishing Beelzebub in the process. On her farm two miles north of Toronto, the Cowboy Junkies songbird fluttered from task to attention-diverting task, starting with an archival dig through album after album of vintage band photographs, which she organized to soon be transferred to digital. And yes, she says, she even found a backstage snapshot commemorating the band’s first-ever show in San Francisco in the late ’80s, when poker-faced actor Sean Penn dropped by for some quiet conversation afterwards.

“There’s one of us in the basement of Great American Music Hall, and it’s so funny, because both of us are sitting on a bench, and we’ve got two feet between us,” she recalls. “And we’re both looking at each other, and it’s really intense—you can really feel the tension.”

Next, she dug into a treasure trove of dusty old cassette tapes of various cover versions undertaken by the quiescent quartet over the years, long after their signature 1988 take on “Sweet Jane,” which were then redone for their covers for a 2020 Songs of the Revolution release, like The Cure’s “17 Seconds,” “Neil Young’s “Love in Mind,” Bob Dylan’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind,” and the late Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Way I Feel.” “And there were some rare songs we found that I just don’t remember ever singing at all,” she confesses.

The recording began in earnest on Such Ferocious Beauty, Cowboy Junkies’ first album of new material in five years, composed by bandleader and brother Michael Timmins in honor of the recent passing of both parents, under completely different circumstances. And her patented smoke-tendril vocals wreath effortlessly around her sibling’s forlorn, occasionally funereal notes and filigrees, from the opening elegy “What I Lost” to a bluesier “Hard to Build, Easy to Break,” the seraphic “Shadows,” the subtly symphonic “Knives,” and the hushed, optimistic closer “Blue Skies.” It’s quite the heartwarming, mortality-themed familial undertaking (especially with brother Peter Timmins on drums and long time bassist Alan Anton providing eerily syncopated rhythm). But at 62, Margo Timmins still felt restless.

“So I started a decluttering company,” she adds. “I was down in people’s basements and I loved it! It was mindless work, but it made people so happy, because they finally had a clean basement. And that helped a lot to give me purpose.” And, of course, dibs on any collectibles folks were discarding, like valuable cameras, corning-ware, even mint-condition comic books. The only thing she didn’t have to busy herself with was songwriting, she says. “It’s always Michael—I stopped writing a long time ago, because his songwriting is up there on such an amazing level, I could never begin to compete.” And here’s where 64-year old Michael Timmins himself chimes in, to relate the rest of the Ferocious fable.

Paste: Nobody seems to talk about this, but going back to the beginning, your first album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, was actually a thing back then, because every once in a while authorities would find these radicals up in the Pacific Northwest who’d assumed that name, and were working on some 12 Monkeys-deadly virus to get, not just whites, but everyone off the Earth now. But now I can’t find any proof that they ever existed. But why would you dub your debut disc that?

Michael Timmins: Yeah! And you have to remember, this was way before the internet, so you had a real lack of information. But we knew there was a group with that slogan or name, Whites Off Earth Now, and we didn’t know anything about it, what they meant or symbolized. But we just loved the idea, because it was such a great picky little statement, because we were just a bunch of white kids playing blues again, so once again suburban white kids were taking this great old Black roots music and pretending to make it their own. So it was sort of a dig at ourselves—it wasn’t necessarily a nod to the organization. We just stole the name, and their slogan. And I’ve done the same as you, you know? Because I’m curious, and I remember coming across this article and loving their name and their slogan, and it was way before Cowboy Junkies were even around, so we had carried it with us. But in recent years, I tried to find them, like, “What was that? Who were those people?” And I can’t find it, either! It’s really interesting, eh?

Paste: And I really hate to say this, but as we teeter on the precipice of extinction, getting closer every day, I’ve noticed that in many superhero films, like Kingsmen and The Watchmen, the super villains have had pretty good ideas, like killer cellphones and a frightened-rabbit nuclear standoff between all countries, worried that Dr. Manhattan will nuke them all.

Timmins: Yeah. Exactly. And it’s hard to judge it, especially if you put it in an historical context, you know? Is what’s going on now worse than what was going on in the 1940s? I don’t think so. But it’s happening to us, and it’s happening now, so obviously it feels like everything’s falling apart. But when you start to go back through history, and think of the plagues that have devastated humanity, we’re not even close, and we’re still in pretty good shape. But we’re trying hard, trying hard to wreck it.

Paste: Going from that to fatherhood, how are your kids doing?

Timmins: Alright, you know? For Covid it was very difficult for them. I think that age bracket was hit hardest, from 18 to 22. Three of these kids were trying to get out in the world and do their thing, get away from their parents, but for a year and a half or so, they all had to just sit in their childhood bedrooms and sleep, you know? And I sort of feel like just now, they’re finally beginning to recover from that. Their natural momentum was stopped, right? So now they’re just beginning to figure that out and build up a bit of steam and get moving again. But I think it was really hard for them, and for that age group, it was the hardest. One was in grade 12, last year of high school, one was in first year of university, and the other was just starting to get into her work, just building up some momentum. But they all got slammed, so it was difficult. And we’re in Toronto.

Paste: And it must have been especially tough—given your love of Asia—for Trump and his ilk to immediately blame China for Covid, dubbing it the “Wuhan Virus.”

Timminis: Yeah. And the thing about Toronto is that it’s very multicultural, and very diverse. So you don’t really have to think too much about those things, but then all of a sudden, there’s this—whatever you want to call him—president? Or appointed leader, and all of a sudden, your children are dealt with, looked on, or being pointed at as minorities. It was weird, just a bit strange. It was horrible.

Paste: How did the pandemic hit you, personally? And obviously, you thought, “Hey—we’re known for covers! Let’s do a whole album’s worth!”

Timmins: Well, those were sort of already in the can, though. They were floating around, and it was a way of bridging things, coming out of Covid. At the time, we were starting to work on this new record, so I think a couple of those [covers] we hadn’t recorded yet, but we had been doing them live. So with that record, it was like, “Let’s get something out there so that when we start up touring again, after Covid, we’ll have something to focus our shows around.

Paste: And just when you think you’re out of the pandemic woods, your father’s health started to decline?

Timmins: Yeah. He had dementia, and my mom had died in the fall of 2018, and she’s lucky because she died of lung complications, so Covid would have been really terrifying for her with that. But my dad was of his age, so as an older man, he was kind of lost in a way, and when my mom died, he was really lost. But the dementia began to get worse and worse, and then with Covid, he didn’t really know what was going on. But by then, we had made a decision that whatever the rules were, we broke them. We went and saw him and visited him, and he was at home, living at home, so we had to deal with that and visit him. So we were very careful, because he had no real idea what was going on, on that level. So he’d want to go somewhere, and we had to keep undermining him, so that was hard. And as dementia happens, he got worse, and finally he died last June. And it was difficult, because it was a really weird time, with Covid and the kids, and especially how Covid affected live music, you know? And that’s what we were living for and living on, so it was a very stressful couple of years.

Paste: Was there a point where you stopped and decided, “I can’t write about this—it’s too close,” Or did you immediately understand that you had to write about it?

Timmins: You know, that’s what I’ve written about my entire life—what’s going on, so it was kind of natural, in a way, for me to write about it. And there are a couple of things on there that are written more directly about it, and some that are indirect, but the overall arching theme to me is the idea of impermanence, so it all kind of flows in with the idea of Covid and what was happening down in your country with social unrest and uncertainty, and the trouble with my dad and his dementia. All of it flowed into this sense of, “Where are we? And what is this?” And it’s amazing how fragile it all is.

Paste: So how did Circe and mythology fit in?

Timmins: Well, I guess when you think about it, Circe and Penelope both deal with impermanence, as well. They’re both dealing with a relationship with a person who’s there and then not there, so their standing in the world is based around him, so that’s part of it, as well. But that’s after the fact—to me, it was just a cool idea, and I followed it.

Paste: “Hell is Real” relies on scripture, as well.

Timmins: It’s more of an ironic statement on that fatalistic sort of outlook, and I think the real lines in that song are “I’m scared and I’m angry” and “I’m scared and I’m lonely” and “I’m scared and I’m empty.” Because that’s what the song’s about—about people being isolated and, well, scared. And not just Covid-wise, but people trying to figure out who they are, economically, and they’re just trying to figure out what’s going on in their lives. That’s what the song’s really about, is those people, which the “Hell is real” part doesn’t seem to want to deal with, because the people who want to tell you Hell is real don’t want to deal so much with the actual feelings of—or care too much about—the actual people that are out there.

Paste: The creepiest track on the record—and it’s almost like the hump the listener has to get over—is “Shadows,” with lyrics like “I can sit here and wait for death.”

Timmins: Yeah. And that song was inspired by a D.H. Lawrence poem called “Shadows,” and he wrote a series of poems when he was nearing the end of his life, and he was sort of reflecting on his life, and that was one of them. So the song is really taken from two sides—it’s from the side of me, imagining my father, because that’s what he’d do, just sit and look out the window all day, and on my visits, I’d wonder what he was thinking about, what he was doing. And eventually, I came to peace with, when I’d visit, just to sit with him, and not try to engage him, necessarily, because he didn’t want to be engaged, and not try to figure out what he was thinking about. So there are two sides—him sitting there, waiting, and me sitting there and just being with him, and just waiting, as well, with neither of us really knowing what we’re waiting for. But that’s what we’re doing, and that was the relationship at that point. So it was a song that started with D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago, and now comes full circle and continues.

Paste: Have you gotten any messages from your folks from the other side?

Timmins: No, I haven’t really, or I don’t think so. But I don’t think my dad would know to do that, and I think my mom would want to be left alone.

Paste: Do you have any concept, mortality-wise, for what comes next? And is it more Eastern or Western, given your background?

Timmins: That’s a good point. I think it’s both. Obviously, I’m indoctrinated in the Western side of things, but the Eastern side of things is what I try and use to figure things out, and so it’s more interesting in a way. But I dunno—I can’t even begin to understand what comes next, but it’s something I think about more now. I really, really do—I really try to find my own peace with it and figure it out, because one thing I do know—which sounds kind of stupid, but I don’t think people actually realize it or admit it—is that it’s coming. You’re not gonna escape it. So I do wanna try to figure it out, because I’d like to have the luxury of being at peace with it. That, to me, is a big thing. And it’s something that my dad didn’t have, but that I think my mom did have—her diagnosis was such that she knew she had a limited amount of life, whereas my dad, when his brain started to go, he lost touch with the reality of this life, so I don’t think he really had any sense of what was happening.

Paste: Has all of this become a big motivating factor for you now?

Timmins: In a way, you know? But not so much with the work. It’s less to do with the work, and more about how I live my life and how I enjoy it. And especially, being Canadian, seasons are a big thing. But recently, a big realization for me has been that my summers are very limited. I have a limited amount of summers left. I don’t know how many, but there’s not that many more, and things like that have made me realize the need to appreciate that, and just to enjoy it, because there’s not a whole lot of time left, all told. So now I do tend to relax a bit more, and enjoy things a lot more.

Watch Cowboy Junkies perform at the Paste Studio in New York on July 23, 2018.