Cowboy Junkies: Music Is The Drug - The Podcast

Welcome to the 50th episode of "Music Is The Drug", and we're marking the occasion with Michael Timmins and Alan Anton discussing perhaps the Junkies' best known recording, "Sweet Jane", from "The Trinity Session". A song that was in the repertoire as far back as "Whites Off Earth Now!!",  we look at the reasons why "Sweet Jane" and the V...

Welcome to the third part of our special series of podcasts to mark the release of Cowboy Junkies’ new album, “Such Ferocious Beauty”. With the help of music from the album, some demos and an excerpt from an as yet unreleased track, this time we’re talking to Alan Anton to get his take on the record, its writing and production and playing it live. To watch the video for "Hard To Build. Easy T...

On June 2nd 2023, Cowboy Junkies release their new album, “Such Ferocious Beauty”, an album of ten songs that is up there with anything they’ve done right across their career.  To celebrate its release, we’ve got a two part conversation with Michael Timmins about the thinking behind the record, its themes and its recording process. Added to that, there’s plenty of music both from the record itself...

On June 2nd 2023, Cowboy Junkies release their new album, “Such Ferocious Beauty”, an album of ten songs that is up there with anything they’ve done right across their career.  To celebrate its release, we’ve got a two part conversation with Michael Timmins about the thinking behind the record, its themes and its recording process. Added to that, there’s plenty of music both from the record itself...

A morality - or immorality - tale for a modern age "Simon Keeper" looks at how greed can, sometimes, bring business to its knees, and, on the opposite side of the coin, how once a scammer, always a scammer... Recorded originally for "Open", using the songwriting demo, the "Open" mix and the finished version on "One Soul Now", Michael Timmins. and Alan Anton...

"Where Are You Tonight?" was first released on "The Caution Horses" in 1990, was on last year's "Sharon" release which looked at the band's first pass at recording that material, was included in the "200 More Miles" live album and is still often included in the live set to this day. So what makes a song such a hardy perennial in the Junkies' h...

When Cowboy Junkies were putting together "Early 21st Century Blues" in 2005, their response to a post 9/11 world where the possibility of greater understanding and unity had, as ever been bulldozed by the rush to war, they were looking to find songs with an anti-violence message, in all the possible senses. On the 2004 "One Soul Now" tour, they had been playing George Harrison...

In this episode, it's the turn of "Hard To Build. Easy To Break.", another new song from the band's upcoming album, "Such Ferocious Beauty", to come under the spotlight. Like "What I Lost", the song is a  co-write by Michael Timmins and Alan Anton and they are both here to talk us through it, along with some exclusive clips from the songwriting demo to boot....

Cowboy Junkies were in the midst of recording 'Renmin Park' for what became the 'Nomad Series' when they heard of the sad death of Vic Chestnut on Christmas Eve 2009. Vic had toured with and supported the band on a number of occasions and their immediate reaction was to produce an album that was a tribute to him and his songs. 'Demons' was the upshot and from that alb...

In our last episode, we talked about a brand new song, "What I Lost", from the band's upcoming new album, "Such Ferocious Beauty". In it, Michael Timmins referenced its thematic links with "Follower 2", a song from "AtThe End Of Paths Taken", so what better time to cover that song than in this episode? Mike and Alan Anton discuss the thinking behind the...

"Music Is The Drug" is back for a fourth series and we're starting out by talking about a brand new song, "What I Lost" from the band's upcoming new album, "Such Ferocious Beauty". A co-write by Michael Timmins and Alan Anton, they take us through the writing and development of the new song and explain why it's the first song to be aired from the new al...

Taken from "At The End Of Paths Taken", "My Little Basquiat" is a song that still has its place in the Junkies' live set some 15 years later. built around Alan Anton's bass groove and featuring on of Michael Timmins' favourite guitar solos, Mike and Alan are here to tell us all about writing the song - or their versions of it anyway - and just what part the 1976...

Going back to Cowboy Junkies' first album, "Whites Off Earth Now!!", in this episode, Michael Timmins and Alan Anton take a look at the whys and wherefores behind the inclusion of Bruce Springsteen's "State Trooper" on a record that otherwise concentrates mainly on earlier blues performers like Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. Dark, brooding, intense, Springsteen&a...

Some songs never quite make it onto albums not because they're not up to standard, but because they simply refuse to fit in with all the other songs. In the olden days, they'd get scooped up and used on the b-side of a single or 12", but in the modern world, they tend to have to wait until a band is ready to issue a 'rarities' stye record. "Ikea Parking Lot" is o...

"Breathing" is a song from the "Ghosts" album that was released by Cowboy Junkies as the world began to slip into Covid lockdown in March 2020. Deeply personal, strikingly minimalist, powerfully emotional, we'll just leave it to Michael Timmins and Alan Anton to explain it all to you... "Music Is The Drug" is available wherever you get your podcasts. Please remem...

"Renmin Park" is surely the most unusual album in the Cowboy Junkies' canon, an album that grew from a trip Michael Timmins and his family took to China. Using ideas and field recordings from his time out there, collaborating with Chinese musicians and writers, leaning heavily on loops and grooves put together by Alan Anton and producer Joby Baker, it's a record that sounds unl...

Having beguiled the world with their first three albums, as Cowboy Junkies approached "Black Eyed Man", they felt it was time to change things up a little, breaking up much of  "The Caution Horses" band, bringing in new musicians, different instruments and a different approach to recording. "Southern Rain", the opening song on that album, exemplified that change in st...

Back in late 1999, we were thinking less about partying and more about whether or not the modern world was going to collapse at midnight on December 31st, ravaged by the Y2K bug. Sean Connery solved that one for us, as Alan Anton points out in this podcast... But the dawning of a new millennium was also time for a little reflection on life, the universe and everything, personally and globally, and...

1979 might not seem an obvious episode for a podcast from a band that didn't start until six years later, but it was a pivotal year for Alan Anton and Michael Timmins as they put together their first ever band, Hunger Project.  Inspired by the bands that broke through that year - The Cure, Public Image Limited, The Fall, Joy Division and others - Alan Anton talks us through the records he and...

In this episode, we’re going back nearly 35 years, to a song from “The Trinity Session”, the album that put Cowboy Junkies on the international map. One of the biggest songs from that album was “Blue Moon Revisited (Song For Elvis)” which was released as a single and was a heavy rotation video on MTV back in the day. We'll hear from Michael Timmins and Alan Anton how it was that the song miss...

Welcome back to the start of the third series of Music Is The Drug - and they said it wouldn't last... It's not too many bands that can dig into their archives and unearth an entire unreleased album, but that's what Cowboy Junkies have done with the upcoming vinyl release of "Sharon" - notes on how to get a copy lie below. Having produced two stunning albums in "White...

The world in tumult. Political instability. War. Yes, that was the far off world of 2005. Thank heavens those times never came again... In the aftermath of 9/11, of the invasion of Iraq, the golden promise of the end of the Cold War just over a decade earlier seemed to be disappearing and memories of Vietnam cane back strong. In the face of that, Cowboy Junkies did what the great bands did in the...

"It's the kind of night that's so cold when you spit, it freezes before it hits the ground..." Has there ever been a better opening couplet to a song than that? Nope. That's how "'Cause Cheap Is How I Feel" begins on "The Caution Horses" album, another single from that record that helped establish the band in the mainstream consciousness and on MTV...

In this special episode we concentrate on "Townies: An Audioplay", the album put together by Michael Timmins and Andy Maize of Skydiggers in 2020 and we are joined by both of them to chart the writing and recording of a project that was initially interrupted, and then informed, by the first Covid lockdown that year. It also owes plenty to Mike's "Improvisations From The Between...

"Blue Guitar" from "Miles From Our Home" is the next Cowboy Junkies song that we're looking closer at with Michael Timmins and Alan Anton. Mike talks us through the pretty unconventional genesis of the song and the reasons why it is ant on the live setlist quite as often as he would like, while Alan lifts the lid on the inspiration for the bassline that grounds the song th...