CLASSIC TRACKS
TOM DOYLE
Back in 1988, with the release of an album, The Trinity Session, recorded almost entirely in a single day, Cowboy Junkies became arguably the first band to create the music sub‐genre which would later become known as alt‐country. A slow‐burning, atmospheric take on country music, at
a time when most artists were relying heavily on programmed sounds, the Canadian four‐piece’s second long‐player was all the more remarkable given that it was recorded live at Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity around one microphone, namely a Calrec Soundfield.
Today, the producer of The Trinity Session, Peter J Moore remembers that for him and the band, the album’s distinctively sparse, reverberating sound was a reaction against the MIDI‐dominated musical styles of the ’80s. “I was angry that music had gotten into drum machines and MIDI,”
he says. “No humanity, no nothing. I’m listening to these recordings from the
’50s with two or three mics and I’m going, ‘Man that’s real music.’”
Moore remembers experiencing
In 1987, swimming against the tide of MIDI‐powered pop records, Cowboy Junkies went into a church to record an album into a single microphone in a single day.
something of an epiphany when it came to the idea of developing his single mic technique. “I got a Billie Holiday record from the German masters which were kept in proper climate‐controlled vaults. I put
it on and I thought, ‘Oh my God, why did we go away from that? Why aren’t we still doing this?’ That right there, that’s when I really got into the single mic recording.”
This notion dovetailed with the ethos that the members of Cowboy Junkies shared about making more naturalistic recordings of their alternative‐edged country. “So I think it was the pendulum
swinging,” Moore says. “The stars lined up and it just happened to be that we were the innovators. The band and myself were sympatico. They wanted to get out of this MIDI and synths artificial thing.”
Then as now, Cowboy Junkies are based around a family unit — singer Margo Timmins, guitarist Michael Timmins and drummer Peter Timmins, along with bassist Alan Anton. The Trinity Session was to produce their best‐known track, a beautifully drowsy cover of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sweet Jane’ (based on the version recorded at Dallas club End
Classic
TRACKS
Cowboy Junkies 'Sweet Jane'
October 2015 / www.soundonsound.com