Ghosts

Album review

"Desire Lines," the first song on the Cowboy Junkies' 2020 album Ghosts, begins with a big blast of distorted guitar that suggests Neil Young stumbled into the studio after a practice session with Crazy Horse. It's not what one would expect from an opening salvo from this band, but Ghosts was inspired by circumstances different than the Cowboy Junkies have experienced in the past. Three of the four bandmembers are siblings -- vocalist Margo Timmins, guitarist Michael Timmins, and drummer Peter Timmins -- and while they were touring in support of 2018's album All That Reckoning, their mother, Barbara Timmins, died. Losing a parent is a profound experience for nearly everyone, and few groups are faced with this level of personal grief impacting so much of the membership at once. The emotions that come from loss are in the forefront on Ghosts, and while sorrow is a large part of that, anger and confusion play as big a role, and this music feels like a wake as much as a memorial, a mixture of mourning and emotional outburst. Ghosts is not a cry against the dying of the light, but it is nakedly emotional and direct in a way that's unusual for the Cowboy Junkies; it embraces electricity and dissonance as expressive tools, not to the point that they dominate the landscape but as necessary punctuation. Which is to say the tenor of this music isn't entirely out of character for the Junkies -- they'd been including electricity and distortion as far back as 1996's Lay It Down -- but the cumulative impact is, and the Timmins siblings (as well as bassist Alan Anton) pour their hearts into the moody quiet of "Breathing" and the quietly soulful "The Possessed" just as they do into the rootsy barroom shuffle of "Misery" and the crashing guitars and drums of "(You Don't Get To) Do It Again." On Ghosts, the pieces all feel like parts of one larger puzzle, and if concluding the album with a celebration of the free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman seems like an odd touch at first, it's also an impassioned reminder that loss never entirely goes away, and that we need to acknowledge those important to us while they're still in our lives. At just eight songs, Ghosts doesn't appear to be meant to be a major statement from the Cowboy Junkies, but its emotional impact outweighs its physical scale, and it's a brave and impressive effort that's as effective as it was necessary.

© Mark Deming /TiVo