Cowboy Junkies

The Cowboy Junkies were chillin’ when chillin’ wasn’t cool. In fact, they were chillin’ before people even called chillin’ chillin’. Over the last quarter century, the band’s set the platinum — no, make that multi-platinum — standard for laid-back, no-fuss loveliness. When the writer himself — the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed — declares that the heavy-lidded CJ cover of “Sweet Jane” is "the best and most authentic version I have ever heard,” well, who are we to argue? Despite their well-deserved rep, the band doesn’t wander entirely through life in a moody fog, as the alt-poppy spun-sugar confection of “Anniversary Song” proves. And with a fistful of fuzz and a foreigner’s eyes, their China-by-way-of-Canada road warrior travelogue, “Stranger Here,” breaks new ice in the Junkies’ musical horizons.

In Next Steps, we’ll hear other people putting words in Timmins & Co.’s mouths, as the band covers the classics . . . from country to rock.

Make no mistake, the Cowboy Junkies are no slouch with the pen themselves, but they have an uncanny ability to burrow into other folks’ greatest songs and extract their cold, cold heart. With a chanson-like accordion calling up images of an absinthe cafe on the banks of the Seine and a bassline that saunters like an overpriced escort, the band transforms Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” into a cruise down the wild side of the soul. The emotional landscape of their cover of Hank Williams’ “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” is barren as the moon’s dark side, a watercolor wash of indigo pigment mixed with bourbon and tears. And their gloss on fellow Canadian Neil Young’s “Powderfinger” pulls the song from its classic-rock guitar-hero showcase and turns it loose in the ruins of an abandoned building slated for destruction.

In Deep Cuts, the Junkies pay tribute to another legendary Canuck, hit the road, and get the blues.

In our Deep Cuts, we’ve got something old, something fairly new, a couple of borrowed songs, and a track from Early 21st Century Blues . We’ll kick it off with a little Canadiana that doesn’t technically appear on any Cowboy Junkies album, as they expose their folky roots on a lo-fi, alt-rock cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Way I Feel.” South of the border, they pick up Bruce Springsteen’s war-weary veteran from “Brothers Under the Bridge” and take him for a lift out of the city and up to the high desert on a clear, cold, starry night. And just to keep their fans and critics guessing, they jump in the wayback machine for a little Haight-Ashbury hippie homage to the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Joy of Cooking in “New Dawn Coming.”

Where else to go for the ultimate in chillout than the Great White North, the Cowboy Junkies’ frozen home? Long winter nights and northern lights are said to lend themselves to darker and deeper thoughts, and the Timminses and friends translate their languid musings into a sonic space with a bare-bones minimum of digital trickery. Think Pentangle meets Mazzy Star somewhere out on the Canadian prairie, and you get the picture. Dreamy, airy, ethereal, yet still somehow rooted, the Cowboy Junkies’ sound is a cumulus cloud of musical wonder, drifting lazily in stasis between Earth and the sky. And for nearly a quarter-century now, they’ve owned that late-night, last-call space like no band ever has . . . or possibly ever will.