A Cowboy Junkies concert certainly contains multitudes. Last night’s show at Auckland’s Town Hall, kicking off their second NZ tour in three years—before that, we’d had to wait over twenty for a visit from the band—started off with the sublime loveliness of Misguided Angel, from 1988’s The Trinity Session, the album that really brought them to the world’s attention, and then led into ‘Cause Cheap Is How I Feel, from the follow-up record The Caution Horses, another thoroughly, breathtakingly beautiful song. But where these songs were beautiful, A Common Disaster was a full-throated roar, while Unanswered Letter was thoroughly funky, and What I Lost, a song written by a brother for his sister to sing, about their father’s descent into dementia, was simply heartbreaking, in equal parts impassioned personal and angry.
And that’s the joy of Cowboy Junkies. Notionally they’re a four-piece band: the three Timmins kids—Michael, the songwriter and guitarist, and Peter, the drummer, accompanying Margo, the singer—and Michael’s long-time friend Alan Anton on bass. On stage they’re almost always accompanied by Jeff Bird on mandolin, harmonica, and, as Margo put it during the band intros at the end of last night’s show, “banging things.” They’re a quintet who’ve been playing together for, as the title of the show reminded us, forty years. And they’ve not stood still, they’ve simply trodden water, over those years. Where their earlier albums were sparse and empty and achingly beautiful, later work has cranked up the amps and flexed the band’s muscles, and the full range was on show last night.
Michael’s (you’ll have to forgive the first-name familiarity; with three siblings in the band, it’s a little inevitable) guitar playing is subtle, understated, and joyous. Hunched over his Telecaster or his 335, he’s the most unassuming rock star you could wish to see, looking more like a dentist in a weekend classic-rock covers band rehearsing with his mates. He did, occasionally, look up at his bandmates, but much of the show saw Michael focused firmly on his instrument. Peter pounded, stroked, tapped, teased his drums a thousand different ways; Jeff provided the accompaniments that took simple songs and fleshed them out into things of great beauty. And Alan drove songs with simple basslines that propelled numbers like A Common Disaster or All That Reckoning more than anyone else on stage.
And then there’s Margo. Yes, Michael writes the songs, but it’s Margo’s vocals that makes them what they are. It’s not unfair to say that her voice has, well, matured over the forty years that she’s been singing with Cowboy Junkies; it’s only fair to add, too, that her voice has lost none of its sheer, utter beauty. In Forgive Me, a forty-year-old cover of a seventy-five-year-old John Lee Hooker song, she found an almost feline sinisterness, while A Common Disaster was a propulsive, almost—by Cowboy Junkies standards—aggressive thing. And Walking After Midnight, or Sweet Jane, well, they were simply beautiful.
And she’s a lovely frontwoman. There are stories about many of the songs—To Love Is To Bury, she told us, was once used by a fan for a wedding song; Margo didn’t, she said, get to tell her that it was in fact the story of a murder-suicide pact. You get the feeling that she genuinely enjoys what she’s doing, that she’s honestly and simply having fun on the stage. This, to be fair, is in stark contrast with Alan, who, as she’s pointed out in previous shows, has never been known to smile on stage, and last night looked like he’d rather be pretty much anywhere than right there.
It wasn’t a perfect show. The set choice was a little surprising—for a show badged as “Celebrating 40 Years,” the setlist seemed to forget a good many of those years. Three songs came from Such Ferocious Beauty, their most recent studio album, one dedicated, as Margo mentioned, to the memory of their father. The band’s first three albums got a decent look-in, as did Lay It Down, from 1996, but that was it. Nothing, then, from Pale Sun, Crescent Moon, their indisputable masterpiece. Nothing from Black Eyed Man, despite Michael’s promise to me, when I spoke to him recently, that they’d fit Murder, Tonight, At The Trailer Park into the show. Nothing from The Nomad Series, the quite remarkable run of four albums he wrote in the early 2010s. (Yes, they played Unanswered Letter, from volume 4, The Wilderness, but Margo introduced it as coming from their most recent release, Most Acoustic Junk.)
And there were occasional moments that, for me at least, didn’t quite work. Forgive Me somewhat lost its way as it drifted from pleasingly swampy blues into rather less swampy free-form jazz. And I know they’ve been playing Sweet Jane every night for, literally, decades, and yes, it makes sense that they want to switch things up a bit, but the intro, let’s be fair, is a little rambling, a little—dare I say it?—self-indulgent.
But then there’s Powderfinger. “We’re a Canadian band,” Margo reminded us. “And especially right now, that’s very important to us.” Makes sense, I’d have to say. “And it’s every Canadian band’s duty to play at least one Neil Young song.” And so they played Powderfinger. In Young’s hands, it’s a perfectly serviceable, unremarkable song. But in 1990, on The Caution Horses, Cowboy Junkies made it into something entirely more special. I’m willing to say it’s as sublimely lovely and affecting as any song I know. And the trio of Margo, Michael, and Jeff Bird, produced a perfectly pared-back reading of this utter beauty of a song, and I was happy.
Cowboy Junkies waited 23 years between NZ shows before they came here to play Takapuna’s Bruce Mason Centre on the disastrous weekend of the Auckland floods in 2023. They came back less than three years later. Assuming a geometric progression, we should see them again in February of next year, I believe. And I’ll be there. They really are something very, very special.
