45andsingle:

COWBOY JUNKIES - Sweet Jane

45rpm single

Mickey: “The whole world’s coming to an end, Mal.”

Outstanding cover of a legendary song.

(via 45andsingle-deactivated20111006)

“Southern Rain” by Cowboy Junkies

(Words/Music: Michael Timmins, Album: Black-Eyed Man, RCA 1992)

Every time I begin listening to the Cowboy Junkies, I always wonder why I stopped. Between the beautifully sweet and occasionally haunting voice of Margo Timmins, the tasteful minimalism of the country/blues instrumentation featuring Michael Timmins on guitar, and the complex and poetic lyrics of heartbreak and lament (also by Michael Timmins), the band never ceases to pull me in to their world of characters and stories. Most known for their cover of Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” first from their 1987 album The Trinity Session and later from the Natural Born Killers Soundtrack, this Canadian alt-country band has made a living singing songs about rural America, especially on their 1992 album Black Eyed Man. Their characters are escaped prisoners at home for one last fling, a promiscuous mystery man who gets hung by the well, and their friend and sometimes collaborator Townes Van Zandt.

“Southern Rain” tells three stories of love, beginning with a fairly couple discussing the weather, followed by the story of a Southern woman who falls for a flashy LA lawyer and puts up with his infidelities, and concludes with a woman driving a long distance through a storm to visit her lover. The lyrics are vintage Cowboy Junkies, filled with ambiguity and minutiae which fix the characters and their situations in your mind. Margo Timmins’s breathy vocals add a sense of urgency to the passionate (or passionless) situations and interpret her brother’s lyrics the way only a sister could. I often find myself sympathizing with the downtrodden characters the same way I would Springsteen’s, the only difference being that Springsteen writes about what he sees in New Jersey while Timmins is a Canadian writing about characters from the American South. One may suggest that because of this, Timmins makes observations more finely in tune with the human psyche and that by placing his characters out of his immediate periphery, he shows the universality of the characters’ problems. Like the last character in the song perceives the rain as a good thing while everyone else complains about it, Margo and Michael Timmins find and display the beauty in the desperate struggles of mankind, no matter where they are.

More Cowboy Junkies: AmazonMP3 – lala – last.fm