I to He Was Sky Vast and Free
Today's formative-album replay: The Cowboy Junkies The Trinity Session. One November night in 1987, a group of Canadian musicians pulled a minor scam on a church and created one of the decade's most essential and cohesive records. Coveting the cavernous sound of the sanctuary but concerned that the church staff would balk at their ambitions for it, not to mention their edgy name, the Cowboy Junkies told the folks at Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity that their name was the Timmins Family Singers, and that they were recording a Christmas special for the CBC. Apparently no one from the church stuck around to hear that the set list included no Yuletide tunes at all but rather a batch of country and rock covers and originals, or perhaps by then it was too late to start asking, since when is "Sweet Jane" a Christmas carol?
The band paid the church back, in a way, by naming their record after it. And with good reason: Recorded through a single mic, The Trinity Session recreates the room it was made in like few records I know. That that room happens to be a church gives the songs both sacramental gravity and spacious lightness, a fairly intoxicating combo. You can hear the room tone fade up at the beginning of the a cappella opening, "Mining for Gold"—the only song I know of to contain a lyric about "silicosis"—but as soon as the mournful harmonica enters on "Misguided Angel," the album's sonic spell is cast and doesn't break for close to an hour. If Phil Spector erected a wall of sound, this album's producer, Peter Moore, laced together something like a gossamer curtain of sound, translucent and faintly undulating in the charged air.
The story goes that the Cowboy Junkies first started to play quietly because of neighbors' noise complaints, and then, once they added the whispery-warm contralto of Margo Timmins on vocals, gave themselves a kind of hairshirt challenge, to see if they could play under her faint volume. This double-dare, how-low-can-you-go ethos explains a lot of the coherence of the band's sound. It also makes the recording feat pulled off by Moore even more impressive. For quiet as they are, the Junkies are not entirely unplugged: Michael Timmins's jangly electric guitar, Alan Anton's bass, and his sister Margo's vocals are all amplified, however minimally (the band happened to luck into a high-quality P.A. system a "guardian angel" left behind at Trinity church, as her brother, Michael Timmins, later put it). That Peter Moore was able to balance these, and the occasional plugged-in pedal steel or slide guitar, with at least four other acoustic instruments—harmonica, fiddle, mandolin, accordion—and capture them in a single stereo input, with literally zero mixing or overdubbing, remains a kind of miracle. As Michael Timmins described it, the "sound was mixed" by "physically moving the instrument."
The result is a record that shouldn't work as well as it does—some of the Junkies' arrangements are so slow and distended, and Margo Timmins's delivery so diffident, they're like skeletons of songs dressed in smoke. The penultimate original "Postcard Blues" is the audio equivalent of a faded photonegative, until Steve Shearer's harmonica cuts through in bleeding color. The album has a few such showmanlike surprises up its sleeve—the bridge of their eerily somnabulent "Sweet Jane," though we know it's coming, has a gorgeously wrenching lift, and "Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" mines the song's relentless circularity in a way that's deeply true to Elvis's version. But its main gesture, leaning into simplicity and spaciousness, works so well in part because they chose the right space for it, one that could absorb all that emptiness and negative capability. This quality it puts this record in the company of some other favorites of mine—Dylan's John Wesley Harding, Everything But the Girl's Acoustic, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, T Bone Burnett—as well as in a class of its own.
The originals aren't strictly speaking on the same level as the covers, and yet they are in many ways the album's key tracks. In particular "Misguided Angel," captured in one serendipitous take (!), is a minor masterpiece of tragic romantic rebellion and resignation, with our narrator willfully choosing a lover who's wild and scary but she just can't quit, and mythologizing his "heart like a Gabriel" and "soul like a Lucifer." The final chorus, rising stirringly to a higher pitch than the first two, concludes with an a cappella pledge that has a distinct chill, given that her lover is probably also violent: "Love you till I'm dead."
Likewise, "To Love Is to Bury" and "200 More Miles" capture the band's earnest, searching aesthetic, with their faux-naif country stylings and self-consciously poetic or gritty imagery of love, death, willow trees, and country roads. By the time Trinity Session lurches to and through its concluding late-night jam, a convincingly spooky bluesification of Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight," its incantatory power has thoroughly enveloped us.
Michael Timmins later marveled that this was "one of those magical moments that musicians rarely find themselves in, when the music takes over and you feel like you aren't really responsible for what you are doing—you are just the channeler. It rarely happens to an individual and it is even rarer for it to happen to a group of players and it is even rarer for it to happen with the tape rolling." Again, that this happened in a house of God just doesn't seem entirely coincidental to me.
The band paid the church back, in a way, by naming their record after it. And with good reason: Recorded through a single mic, The Trinity Session recreates the room it was made in like few records I know. That that room happens to be a church gives the songs both sacramental gravity and spacious lightness, a fairly intoxicating combo. You can hear the room tone fade up at the beginning of the a cappella opening, "Mining for Gold"—the only song I know of to contain a lyric about "silicosis"—but as soon as the mournful harmonica enters on "Misguided Angel," the album's sonic spell is cast and doesn't break for close to an hour. If Phil Spector erected a wall of sound, this album's producer, Peter Moore, laced together something like a gossamer curtain of sound, translucent and faintly undulating in the charged air.
The story goes that the Cowboy Junkies first started to play quietly because of neighbors' noise complaints, and then, once they added the whispery-warm contralto of Margo Timmins on vocals, gave themselves a kind of hairshirt challenge, to see if they could play under her faint volume. This double-dare, how-low-can-you-go ethos explains a lot of the coherence of the band's sound. It also makes the recording feat pulled off by Moore even more impressive. For quiet as they are, the Junkies are not entirely unplugged: Michael Timmins's jangly electric guitar, Alan Anton's bass, and his sister Margo's vocals are all amplified, however minimally (the band happened to luck into a high-quality P.A. system a "guardian angel" left behind at Trinity church, as her brother, Michael Timmins, later put it). That Peter Moore was able to balance these, and the occasional plugged-in pedal steel or slide guitar, with at least four other acoustic instruments—harmonica, fiddle, mandolin, accordion—and capture them in a single stereo input, with literally zero mixing or overdubbing, remains a kind of miracle. As Michael Timmins described it, the "sound was mixed" by "physically moving the instrument."
The result is a record that shouldn't work as well as it does—some of the Junkies' arrangements are so slow and distended, and Margo Timmins's delivery so diffident, they're like skeletons of songs dressed in smoke. The penultimate original "Postcard Blues" is the audio equivalent of a faded photonegative, until Steve Shearer's harmonica cuts through in bleeding color. The album has a few such showmanlike surprises up its sleeve—the bridge of their eerily somnabulent "Sweet Jane," though we know it's coming, has a gorgeously wrenching lift, and "Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" mines the song's relentless circularity in a way that's deeply true to Elvis's version. But its main gesture, leaning into simplicity and spaciousness, works so well in part because they chose the right space for it, one that could absorb all that emptiness and negative capability. This quality it puts this record in the company of some other favorites of mine—Dylan's John Wesley Harding, Everything But the Girl's Acoustic, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, T Bone Burnett—as well as in a class of its own.
The originals aren't strictly speaking on the same level as the covers, and yet they are in many ways the album's key tracks. In particular "Misguided Angel," captured in one serendipitous take (!), is a minor masterpiece of tragic romantic rebellion and resignation, with our narrator willfully choosing a lover who's wild and scary but she just can't quit, and mythologizing his "heart like a Gabriel" and "soul like a Lucifer." The final chorus, rising stirringly to a higher pitch than the first two, concludes with an a cappella pledge that has a distinct chill, given that her lover is probably also violent: "Love you till I'm dead."
Likewise, "To Love Is to Bury" and "200 More Miles" capture the band's earnest, searching aesthetic, with their faux-naif country stylings and self-consciously poetic or gritty imagery of love, death, willow trees, and country roads. By the time Trinity Session lurches to and through its concluding late-night jam, a convincingly spooky bluesification of Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight," its incantatory power has thoroughly enveloped us.
Michael Timmins later marveled that this was "one of those magical moments that musicians rarely find themselves in, when the music takes over and you feel like you aren't really responsible for what you are doing—you are just the channeler. It rarely happens to an individual and it is even rarer for it to happen to a group of players and it is even rarer for it to happen with the tape rolling." Again, that this happened in a house of God just doesn't seem entirely coincidental to me.
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