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Cowboy Junkies
Miles from Our Home
(Geffen)
First Appeared at The Music Box, November 1999, Volume 6, #11
Written by Michael Karpinski
Let's face facts: The Cowboy Junkies will never be mistaken for a party band. Barenaked Ladies,
they are not, despite hailing from the same hometown of Toronto, Ontario. But Canadian kinship
aside, the two groups could not possibly be more polar-opposite. In drug parlance (they do call
themselves "junkies," after all), the brothers and sister Timmins and bassist Alan Anton's
backwater, often Orbison-esque laments and odes to loneliness have always been more heroin than
hemp. The Ladies bring cocaine to the rave. The Cowboys: Quaaludes to the wake.
Their seventh album, Miles from Our Home, finds the Cowboy Junkies mining familiar
thematic terrain, albeit with some subtle but notably atypical sonic embellishments. Building on
1996's Lay It Down, new producer John Leckie (Radiohead, The Verve, Stone Roses) gooses the
Junkies' traditionally minimalist mix with just the right pinches of harmonica, harmonium, pedal
steel, and strings. Margo Timmins' instantly distinguishable, whiskey-warm vocals (a huskier cousin
to Karen Carpenter's aching alto) are lushly layered, as are primary songwriter Michael Timmins'
graceful guitar arpeggios and his judiciously integrated array of electric riffs and fills
(reminiscent of R.E.M. in Automatic for the People/Fables of the Reconstruction
dark-folk mode).
Musically and lyrically, Miles from Our Home treads a decidedly tenuous line (that is,
when it can be bothered to abandon the lithium-listlessness of dormant porch swings and rickety
rocking chairs). A work thoroughly drenched in melancholy introspection, it nonetheless succeeds in
never quite crossing over into maudlin morbidity. The 10½ songs essentially serve as a series of
haunting psalms on life, loss, and the meaning of it all, while the songs' narrators remain placidly
passive in the ever-evolving face of fate -- watching, waiting, wondering, but never surrendering.
Thus, No Birds Today, an obsessive, desolate dirge of loves lost and lives misled, and
Blue Guitar, a ghostly folk-blues eulogy to the sadly undersung Texan troubadour Townes Van
Zandt, are more than balanced in their ethereal bleakness by the soaring, forward-looking chorus of
New Dawn Coming and the undeniable snap, crackle, and pop of the title track.
Miles from Our Home ends (officially-speaking) with the utterly uplifting Those Final Feet, a
gospel-tinged hymn driven by the unlikely honky-tonk trinity of piano, organ, and
washboard-against-a-rusty-tub percussion. "Life is loss," it seems to say. "But so long as there is
life, then all is not lost." 
Miles from Our Home is available from Amazon.
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 1999
The Music Box
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