By Lauren Mook
Buffalo, NY – The Cowboy Junkies perform in concert at Babeville Thursday night. WBFO's Lauren Mook talks with band-member Alan Anton about the Cowboy Junkies' latest project and how they've evolved over the past 25 years.
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The Cowboy Junkies rose to fame in the late 1980s by adding their alternative-country flavor to songs like the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," Hank Williams' "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry," and with a plethora of their own haunting tunes, spread over dozens of albums.
In 1988, the Junkies spent a night in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, circled around a single microphone, and recorded what would become their second record, "The Trinity Session." In 2008, to mark the album's 20th anniversary, they did the same thing, at the urging of a filmmaker who wanted to produce a live music DVD.
The Cowboy Junkies are currently working on another ambitious project, called the "Nomad Series," for which they will release four albums in just 18 months. The first of these albums, "Renmin Park," which is set to come out any day now, began with Mike Timmins recording typical city sounds while living in China. These sounds then became loops, and were later flushed out into Junkies songs.