The Cowboy Way, Older and Wiser, and Coming to Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre

They came from the great white northern outpost of Toronto with a moody lo-fi sound and balmy charm the music world took a shining to, especially in hipper and more open-eared quarters. They were indie before Indie was a thing. They were, and are, Cowboy Junkies, built around the Montreal–born Timmons siblings — singer Margo, guitarist Michael, and drummer Peter, along with friend Alan Anton on bass — and apparently built to last.

Now celebrating more than 35 years together and a 21-title discography with a fine new album released in June, Such Ferocious Beauty, the band has hit the road, and stops in at the Lobero Theatre on Friday, July 21. We can imagine an ideal site-sound pairing of the organically inspired country/folk/rock/shoegaze band and the Lobero’s intimate, historic room.  

Legend precedes them, musically and sonically. The Junkies’ 1988 album The Trinity Session was recorded with a single, omnidirectional ambisonic microphone in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity (its vintage setting captured on the album cover). The album’s evocative coolness beautifully wraps around Margo’s understated, in-no-hurry vocal ambience.

Recent years have seen themes of real life and musical life changes on records: 2020’s Ghosts largely deals with the passing of the Timmons’ mother, while last year’s Songs of the Recollection finds them serving up savory cover versions of some favorite tunes. Tellingly, this cover album says much about the influences which guided them into their own sound and aesthetic — fellow Canadians Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot, Gram Parsons (a dreamy and woozy “Ooh Las Vegas”), David Bowie, Vic Chesnutt, Bob Dylan, and another moodster band, the Cure (“Seventeen Seconds”) to close.

Cover songs have been very good to this band, whose biggest “hit” was their church basement-y version of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” from The Trinity Session, the final track on which is a bluesy stroll over the classic Patsy Cline hit “Walking After Midnight.”

Like Ghosts, Such Ferocious Beauty is a song set with reflections on mortality and personal loss, coming on the heels of the Timmons’ father’s death, after years of dementia. The thematic focus is introduced on the opening “What I Lost” and on the family and life-related single “Hard to Build, Easy to Break” (“Hard to build, easy to break/Cradle it in your arms/Ooh for your children’s sake”). The closing “Blue Skies” is a stripped-down lament, mostly just voice and acoustic guitar, with an abrupt end, as if an emotional thought without the benefit of easy closure.

And yet the album is also life-affirming, an example of processing grief through the filter of songs. Sonically, the album is from another place than Trinity Session minimalism, with a few ferocious rock moments of drums and guitar feedback-flecked sounds amidst the old furniture of folk and country. The Junkies are older, wiser, and still riding its sturdy, veteran horse of a band.

Cowboy Junkies perform at the Lobero Theatre on Friday, July 21 at 7:30 p.m. See lobero.org/events/an-evening-with-the-cowboy-junkies.