BOTW - The Cowboy Junkies

So a friend posted an interesting article on Facebook from The Alternate Root listing their opinion of the top roots albums of the past 25 years. Of course I was intrigued, but the most exciting part was rekindling an old flame.

Now I know you all have issues with the moniker "Alt-Country"...so you probably couldn't get past the eye rolling enough to read the above mentioned article which I recently posted on this blog. (Honestly enough with the eye rolling. You could injure yourselves - pop an aneurism or a kidney stone or something.) If you did read the article, then #9 is the flame of which I speak. Yes, The Cowboy Junkies. And despite the name, they really aren't cowboy at all.

Senior year in high school I fell in love with #9, their album The Trinity Sessions. It is a thing of beauty. Remember at this time I was mostly listening to bands you would find on MTV's 120 Minutes, or playing in your local mosh pit. So this was quite a departure for me. Unbeknownst to teenage me the Los Angeles Times named the album one of the top ten albums of 1988, and they were nominated for Group of the Year at the Juno Awards in 1990 and 1991.

The band formed in 1985 and is comprised of three siblings and an outsider all from Toronto, Canada. Their sound using the ambisonic microphone and a mix of blues, country, folk, rock and jazz has earned them both critical attention and a cult following. They continue to make albums, but none have attained the fame of The Trinity Sessions. In 2007 they released Trinity Revisited, a re-recording of the album with guests Ryan Adams (oh I love him!), Natalie Merchant and Jeff Bird among others.

If you get nothing else from this post, you must listen to their cover of The Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane. Ethereal. Sublime. Even Lou Reed likes it.

I love this one too. I was never into bad boys...but singing this song could let any girl's imagination run a little wild. Misguided Angel also off of "The Trinity Sessions."

This is a sublime cover of Townes Van Zandt's To Live's to Fly off of a subsequent album "Black Eyed Man."

Blue Moon Revisited (A Song for Elvis) - what is not to love about a harmonica? Who is that girl in the video?  Who knows?