When I write I need seclusion: somewhere to sit and stare and think and mutter to myself and plink away on my guitar. I often rely on the kindness of strangers (or family and friends) and borrow their unused rural retreats, where I set up for a week at a time and get lost in myself. It’s a completely egocentric, selfish way to spend ones time...and I love it. I think it’s my favourite part of an album project: the week starts with an empty page and six tuned strings and ends up with a song, alchemy at its finest. One of the locations where I wrote a lot of the songs for The Wilderness was a small cottage in Presqu'ile Park, set on the shore of Lake Ontario about two hours east of Toronto. We Are The Selfish Ones is, in some ways, a song about the process of creating, it’s about sitting and reflecting, it’s a nod to those of us lucky enough to make a living reflecting our inner most thoughts back at the world. Here is my song-writing demo for the song...I ended up adding another verse right before Margo sang the version that ended up on The Wilderness.

He sits alone in his perfect shack
the lake beside him freezing
the sun no longer shining
much past four o’clock.

We are the selfish ones
We are the lucky ones
We are the needed ones

She falls asleep, the book on her lap,
“all things change to something new,
something strange.”

We are the selfish ones
We are the lucky ones
We are the needed ones

We walk along with my hand on your back,
the days behind receding
forward to a day when all we love will pass.

We are the selfish ones
We are the lucky ones
We are the needed ones

He sits alone in his perfect shack
the lake beside him freezing
the sun no longer shining
much past four o’clock.

Previous blogs about the making of The Wilderness, Angels in The Wilderness, Fairytale, Unanswered Letter.
 

We will be having a listening party for The Wilderness on the site on February 23rd (which is the day that we will also start pre-orders for the album). Stop by and give the album a listen.

The Nomad Tour begins on February 23rd. The first leg brings us through the North East USA: Ithaca, West Long Branch, Providence, Ridgefield, Annapolis, Alexandria, Norfolk, Charlottesville, Charleston, Harrisburg, Boston, Philadelphia, West Hampton Beach.

Also, we will be starting pre-orders for The Wilderness on February 23rd. In celebration of releasing the final volume of the series we will be having a one day listening party. We will posting the album here on the 23rd, so stop on by for an hour and take a listen.

Last Spring a long time friend of the band, John Bottomley, a fellow musician, died unexpectedly (as they euphemistically say in the obituaries these days). John had been living on Vancouver Island for many years. He had fallen in love with the mountains, the rivers and the trees, but, I guess, had fallen out of love with life. At his funeral his mother lamented the fact that John had settled out west, if only he had been living closer to home, back in Ontario, closer to his family and friends, closer to his roots, if only....
Unanswered Letter was the last song that I wrote for The Wilderness and the last song that I wrote for The Nomad Series. It was a few days after John’s funeral and I headed up to Margo’s farm to try and finish off a few songs: a beautiful spring weekend, with all of the streams and rivers roaring and the spring migration gathering steam (not unlike the weekend weather that had inspired the song Good Friday fifteen years earlier). As I sat beside the river that flows across Margo’s property I thought about John and tried to imagine a state of mind in which even the chatter of a returning red-wing blackbird, a harbinger in these parts of warmer, brighter, easier days to come, could be interpreted as a mocking, insulting cry, “I am home and you are not”.

After Pete, Al, Margo and I had worked up a bedtrack for the song I sent it out to Joby Baker in Victoria, to see where his imagination and talent would take the song. Joby had worked with John on his last album, but I didn’t tell Joby what or who the song was about. What I got back was completely unexpected; an eerie, haunted backing track of bowed bass and ghostly vocals. What was most unexpected was that the song now sounded like a John Bottomley song....the mystery of the creative process: it keeps some of us going, until it doesn’t.
Here is the demo that I wrote and recorded that beautiful Spring day:

Her heart torn open
and left like an unanswered letter.

Words were not spoken
just left in a spidery scrawl.

Twisted and gutted,
the last of the smoke in the air.

She gets up to leave
and idly fixes her hair.

Words from home, words from home.
What we miss are words from home.

I lost my heart
I left it alongside the river.

That blackbird clucking
songs he knows nothing about.

That bird returning
to a home that makes him sing out.

Words from home, words from home.
What we need are words from home.

We will be having a listening party for The Wilderness on the site on February 23rd (which is the day that we will also start pre-orders for the album). Stop by and give the album a listen.

The Nomad Tour begins on February 23rd. The first leg brings us through the North East USA: Ithaca, West Long Branch, Providence, Ridgefield, Annapolis, Alexandria, Norfolk, Charlottesville, Charleston, Harrisburg, Boston, Philadelphia, West Hampton Beach.

I began work on many of the songs that found their way onto The Wilderness in late 2007/ early 2008, (months before my family and I took off for China, the trip that would inspire Renmin Park, the album that would kick off The Nomad Series). Some friends of mine had graciously given me the use of their writers retreat: an old crumbling cottage perched high upon the Niagara Escarpment about one hour north of Toronto. I spent several days a month, over the course of that winter, huddled by the enormous woodstove, watching the snow drift and the birds come into the feeders, plunking away on my J200, trying to figure out what direction our next album should take. Some of these songs made it as far as the concert stage, and throughout the Spring and Summer of 2008 we performed them on tour. But I could never get a handle on the collection of songs that was beginning to emerge. They never felt part of a single “piece”; I couldn’t figure out what tied them all together and therefore had no direction to chase them and without a direction it seemed pointless to try and form them into a defined collection of songs. But then my trip to China intervened and with that came a whole set of new ideas and the preliminary concept for the Nomad Series. From the outset it was decided that many of the songs that we had been working on before China, would be held on to until Volume 4. We figured that with the luxury of time and distance we would be able to get some perspective on these songs, so we put them away.
Sure enough, time and distance did the trick, but so did the chance coupling of this set of songs and Enrique’s winterscape that graces the album cover. The Wilderness which I had originally chosen as a "place holder" while we mocked up the cover, became the perfect title. Enrique’s painting became the physical manifestation of these songs, this is what these songs “looked” like. And the title, The Wilderness, in some odd way seemed to define what these songs were actually “about”: fragility, emptiness, loneliness, beauty, loss, desperation, the delicate balancing act that makes up a life. They are about being lost in the wilderness of age, the wilderness of parenthood, in the wilderness of just trying to find meaning and substance, happiness and truth in ones day to day life. They are about standing alone in middle of it all, breathing in the cold still air and wondering.
 

Fairytale is one of the first songs that I wrote for The Wilderness. Here is my demo for it. (The Wilderness will be for sale from our site starting February 23rd)

The Nomad Tour begins on February 23rd. The first leg brings us through the North East USA: Ithaca, West Long Branch, Providence, Ridgefield, Annapolis, Alexandria, Norfolk, Charlottesville, Charleston, Harrisburg, Boston, Philadelphia, West Hampton Beach.

Cowboy Junkies,

I was listening to an interview on NPR featuring you and your song, "I Cannot Sit Sadly By Your Side." I was so moved by the passion, heart, story, musicality, and vocal talents featured in this song, that I was inspired to create a dance piece for it. I wanted to thank you for the music and send you a link to the final product.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWPS8aVaSUc

Keep creating wonderful music and Happy New Year to all of you!

Has it really already been a year? At the end of our European tour last November we decided to take a year off the road. Our most extended break in over a decade. There were a couple of one-offs that we couldn’t pass up like in Budapest and Beijing, but we haven’t seen the inside of a tour bus for twelve months: funny how it seems like only a month or so ago that we battled the bus from hell across Northern Europe.

It has certainly been a busy year. After we got home from Europe we finished off Demons, we recorded and released Sing In My Meadow and have made huge inroads into volume 4, The Wilderness. I also recorded and released a couple of albums for Latent: Ivy Mairi’s No Talker and Cootes Leland’s Trail Of Smoke, as well as working on a number of other smaller projects in our studio. Perhaps that is why this year has passed so quickly.

Hamburg (Nov 2 and 3)
It’s always hard to get going again. The disruption on the home front is always unsettling. My way to assuage the guilt of leaving is to go around the house changing all of the burnt out light bulbs. Once that is done I feel that I have left the family on a firm footing. The flight across the pond was thankfully uneventful (except for the $1700 excess baggage fee) and we arrived in Hamburg without the loss of a single bag or instrument case. On Day 1 the only struggle was to try and stay awake long enough to trick ones internal clock in to readjusting to the time change. Fat chance. The 3am wake-up is inevitable, you’d think we would have learnt by now.

Day 2 was gig day. It was a new venue for us, Fabrik, located in an old factory of some sort: a very beautiful old building (in an industrial kind-of-way) that has been intelligently reconfigured. When we walked in we weren’t quite sure of what it would sound like, but we were quickly won over at soundcheck. Tonight’s show was the type of gig that is responsible for keeping bands like us out on the road for 25 years. One of those magic gigs where the sound on stage is perfect and each player is reacting to what the other is doing, where the band moves as a single organism, growing, growling, collapsing and reacting as a unit. It’s the type of gig that when one comes off stage you think, “I never, ever want to stop doing this”. The audience was also in tune and was willing to come along for the ride as we dipped deeply into The Nomad Series and Sing In My Meadow in particular. The songs on volume 3 are particularly fun to play live and I have a feeling their intensity will grow over the coming years.

Hannover (November 4)
We were due for a bit of a letdown. All of the travel, a couple of days and nights of fighting jetlag and all of the energy spent on the first gig was bound to take its toll. We have never been to Hannover, but it was hard to do too much exploring, my body is confused and sometimes it’s best to just stay relatively still and let it orientate itself. It was a nice enough venue tonight, but it seemed set up for more of a rock band: a very high stage and a PA that was much too powerful for the room. Jared had trouble controlling the sound out front and consequently we had a tough time finding our sound on stage. It wasn’t a terrible night, but not nearly as good as last night. It was more like work tonight, but enjoyable work. Once again the audience was terrific. We have been, and where possible will continue, dividing the show into two hour long sets and reserving the entire first set for songs from The Nomad Series and then playing the “hits” and some obscurities in the second set. It seems to be working and, so far, the audiences seem to be reacting well to the concept.

Berlin (November 5)
Last night was our first night on the bus although we sat all night outside the gig and didn’t move until 7:30 this morning. A four hour trek along the autobahn isn’t the best way to start a day, but what can you do, this is Europe, you roll with the punches. Berlin is one of those cities that you can’t really get a feel for on just one visit. We have been coming here for over two decades (our first time was right before the wall came down) and I can’t say that I have figured this place out. All I know is that it’s got the energy and insanity of all the great cities of the world. It’s always a pleasure to come here. One nice feature about this bus is that all of the bunks have windows in them. This morning I lay in my bunk, watching Berlin roll by on this beautiful fall morning.

This is our fourth time playing this venue (Passionkirsche) and yet I’m still not exactly sure where it is located in Berlin. The neighbourhood surrounding it is very active and full of young families. The square across from the church was occupied by a flea market today and the food market just beyond was full of families out for a late breakfast. I spent some time wandering through the neighbourhood’s old graveyard which was especially spectacular in its fall colours. I even saw a few types of warbler-ish birds that I’ve never seen before. If I had a life list I’d have something to add to it.

The Passionkirsche is a beautiful and still active church that has a lot of musical events, although most of them are acoustic. It’s always a little tricky turning up the amplifiers in here. Fortunately we have some experience dealing with its sonic challenges. We had a magical gig tonight. It wasn’t as musically locked in as the Hamburg show but there was fantastic energy and there seemed to be a real communion between the band and audience: really fun night on both sides of the stage.

That wraps up the German leg of the tour....tonight it’s an overnight drive to Belgium and a day off In Bruges.

The Daily Telegraph: “..after a quarter century, the Cowboy Junkies are still producing music to challenge and engage...” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/8828202/Cowboy-Junkies-Sing-In-My-Meadow-CD-review.html
 

Blogcritics.com: “among the most brazen effort in the veteran band’s entire catalog...reverb and thick, corrosive riffs drive this thing, alternating between robust, menacing cuts and comparatively abstract, mood-driven ones..”    http://blogcritics.org/music/article/music-review-cowboy-junkies-sing-in/

Metromix.com: “...the Junkies at their rawest and roughest...shows yet another side of the most versatile, underated bands of the last 25 years.” http://newyork.metromix.com/music/standard_photo_gallery/new-music-in-stores/2862890/photo/2862948
 

No Depression: “..an exciting glimpse into the bands depth and power..” http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blog/list?user=312u3do8fof3z
 

Paste: “..sounds like it would fit right in with their platinum records from early in their career...” http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/10/cowboy-junkies-sing-in-my-meadow.html
 

quick before it melts: “...few bands, have managed to keep challenging and pushing boundaries a quarter century after forming the way that Cowboy Junkies have...” http://www.quickbeforeitmelts.com/2011/10/3rd-crusade/