August 04
The Riverside Th..
Junkies go with the flow
Even with 25 years of success,
the Cowboy Junkies must adapt -
like all other performers – to keep their music out there in a world of declining CD sales
BY BERNARD PERUSSE, THE GAZETTENOVEMBER 18, 2009
“It’s shocking to me when you say 25 years,” the group’s bassist, Alan Anton, said during a recent telephone interview. “It was 20 years the other day, it seems.”
Anton and Junkies co-founder Michael Timmins, both 50 now, have been at it considerably longer than that. “Mike and I started to get together to play in kindergarten,” Anton said. “I’m not talking about music, obviously. I’m just talking about playing.”
“What brought us together was a love of listening to music at a very young age,” he said. "There was an older brother in the (Timmins) household who had good musical taste. So we’d listen to the Velvet Underground at the age of 11 and go ‘Wow! Cool! What’s that?’ "
But the band – Anton and guitarist Timmins, with the latter’s sister Margo on vocals and their brother Peter on drums – can’t really afford to spend much time looking back. Like so many other artists, they have to struggle with the 2009 reality of keeping their music out there in the face of declining consumer interest in CDs.
“You can’t just put out a record every two years anymore, because you disappear, marketing-wise,” Anton said. “You have to keep putting stuff out to let people know you’re around.”
Toward that end, the group regularly offers rarities and new material on its website, found at latentrecordings.com/cowboyjunkies. Their next album might also take a resourceful approach to keeping their name out there.
“We’re trying to figure out how to release it,” Anton said. “We might do something different. We’re talking about four EPs and eventually putting it all together into one package. It’s a double-CD-length album right now, and we hope to release the first instalment within a few months.”
Left to indulge his own tastes, however, Anton is as old-school as it gets: He’s a vinyl record man. The Junkies, in fact, have just released a vinyl reissue of their first album, the almost-all-covers Whites Off Earth Now!!
“(Vinyl is) still really for afficionados and purists,” Anton said. “It’s really a side project. I think we printed 1,000 or something. But if I have the time, and I’m at home and the kids are not noisy, I’ll always put on vinyl. I love it. There’s something in the sound.”
Fittingly, Anton said he’s saddened by the idea that the album format might be on its last legs. "Growing up in the album era, it wasn’t just one song we were interested in. We wanted to hear how the whole album was sequenced, how it flowed – and that was all part of the discussion.
“It was part of the artistry of rock music. The idea of just plucking songs here and there doesn’t appeal to me,” he said. “But you have to go with the technological flow, basically, and try to figure out what works in new formats.”
On a professional level, part of that flow involves a different rhythm – not only to releasing music, but to going on the road.
“Touring 10 days out of the month is what we’re trying to do,” Anton said. “Partly, that has to do with the fact that we all have kids and we don’t want to be on the road for six months at a time. Also, it just works marketing-wise these days. It gets you noticed because you’re out there playing all the time, rather than disappearing, working on a record for a year and then touring for six months after that.”
Short, but more frequent bursts of live appearances breaks that album-tour cycle, Anton said. An 80-song live repertoire, which allows the group’s set list to change nightly, will provide the basis for their two Montreal shows at L’Astral, tonight and tomorrow night.
Anton says he’s surprised the group is still doing it after almost a quarter-century.
Surprised, but, of course, not surprised.
“It’s always been our goal to play music,” he said. “It’s always been a natural thing to be doing. We don’t really think, as the years go by: ‘Do we still want to do this?’ or ‘Is it still happening?’ It’s what we’ve always done and wanted to do as kids.”
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