We are on the home stretch of our Canadian Tour, with just a handful of shows remaining. We’ll be winding the whole tour up with a special performance in Toronto on Saturday, July 14th at The Great Hall (Queen and Davenport). This is a benefit concert in support of the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC) (http://parc.on.ca/) and community mental health. It’s an important cause and one which we are proud to be associated. It will be a great night of music. You can purchase tickets here:
We packed our bus last Friday and sent it West, then spent the last past few days with our families preparing to leave them as they recover from surgery, cram for finals and struggle to finish up end of year projects. We will be absent for that transition in to Summer vacation, that beautiful rush of freedom and energy. Yesterday we all flew in to Penticton from various points, catching snatches of the Euro Cup in various airport bars: Portugal coming alive, the Dutch sputtering. We arrived in Penticton at dinner time and ate at a water side restaurant with very average, very over-priced food but with an amazing view of Lake Okanagan and the mountains that ring it. It was worth the larceny. This is the start of a very long cross Canada tour as an opening act for John Mellencamp. Despite being Canadian we have done very few cross Canada tours and we have never played in about 80% of the towns and cities that we’ll be visiting. We are approaching it as a great adventure.
Today was a long day, especially for the crew, Jared and Chris had to load in and set up at 8am. The rest of us stumbled in to the venue at 10, occupied the stage for a couple of hours to get our monitors set and generally get comfortable and then we broke it all down. We appreciate the generosity of the Mellencamp-camp, letting us use some of their production time….it’s a true luxury. I took the opportunity of some free time between production rehearsal and soundcheck and grabbed my fishing rod, rented a kayak and tried to find a ledge in the lake that some local had told me about. I wasn’t out there for very long before a thunderstorm came racing down the valley and chased me back to shore. I plan to fish wherever I can this tour, especially in BC, where highways trace the paths of wild rivers.
Soundcheck today (as it will be everyday) was at 5pm, dinner at 6:30, showtime at 7:30, off by 8:15. I love a well run ship and this one looks to be in fine trim. A little know fact is that John Mellencamp’s music was a pretty big influence on the band and an influence that we probably haven’t acknowledged enough. When we were putting together the songs for Trinity Session, Mellencamp’s albums Scarecrow and The Lonesome Jubillee were enormous hits. We listened to them a lot and his arrangements and use of fiddle and accordion was very inspiring, especially the way he used accordion. So we owe it to John for setting us off down a path that lead to Jaro and Jeff (who we initially contacted as a fiddle player). We are very happy to be along for this ride, it feels like another completed circle.
Considering that we hadn’t played together in several weeks, and we were on a strange stage, in a strange room, in a strange situation…I think our opening night rocked. My favourite part of Mellencamp’s set tonight was the audience sing-a-long, five thousand strong, during an acoustic performance of Jack and Dianne….”oh yaaaa, life goes aaaawwwaawwn, long after the thrill of livin’ is gawwwaawwn”….how great is that…..
Summer is almost here….and we have a lot going on in the next few months:
Our Canadian Tour in support of John Mellencamp starts up in a little over a week and it will include some stops along the way where we will be playing our own shows (Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Parry Sound, Sherbrooke). We are also playing some shows with John in a couple of provinces where we have never performed (PEI and Newfoundland). In August we will be back on the road by ourselves in the North East of the USA. Check out the Tour Dates page for all the relevant info.
Amazon will continue to sell digital downloads of The Wilderness for $5 throughout the month of June (for USA customers only). Also, we continue to sell our five album box set of The Nomad Series for just $25.
The Nomad Series book is about to go to the printer, which means that we should have it in hand by mid-summer at the latest. We will be mailing it out to our Clubhouse Subscribers as soon as we get it, but in the meantime, if you are not a Clubhouse member, this is your final chance to join. We have extended the Clubhouse term to January 1, 2013. With the subscription you get all of the digital content on our website (many hundreds of recordings) as well as The Nomad Series book. The book is going to be quite special: it’s a 140 page full colour, coffee table art book, bound in a linen hard cover and it will contain cds of the four volumes of The Nomad Series. It is designed by our friend Enrique Martinez Celaya who also did the artwork for The Nomad Series. It will be a very limited edition and when they are gone, they are gone. So you can guarantee that you will receive a copy by joining The Clubhouse. You can check out all the details about The Clubhouse Subscription here.
The Tour Diary will be starting up again next week, so be sure to check back frequently to see how our adventure on the road are coming along.
In case you missed it the first time…here is a live performance on CBC Drive of me, Margo and Jeff performing Fairytale from The Wilderness, enjoy:
Amazon will be selling The Wilderness as a digital download for just $5 throughout the month of June (USA customers only). The album has received some very nice reviews:
“…a gorgeous new album…” – NPR All Songs Considered
“Each word and note of this album feels so deeply percolated and thoughtfully placed
that it’s hard to believe that this is the fourth record the experienced Canadian altcountry band have released in 18 months.” – Daily Telegraph
“Consider this music a salve for the soul – restful, resigned, pretty and pensive… and yet as fragile as it is fleeting.” – Blurt
Also, please check out the complete Nomad Series box set if you haven’t already:
“Cowboy Junkies may never step out of the shadow of their seminal The Trinity Session recording, but there’s no reason the ambitious opus of the Nomad Series couldn’t otherwise serve as their masterwork.” – Paste
Inside The Music, the CBC Radio 2 documentary program, has produced an hour long documentary on the evolution and history of the band. It includes an extensive interview with me and Margo as well as interviews with a few of the people that have helped us along the way and a lot of well chosen audio clips. It’s a beautifully produced piece and worth an hour of your time.
Just an update for those of you wondering when the book will emerge…It is finished and about to be printed (we are just waiting on one final approval). Our plan is to have it in the hands of our Clubhouse Subscribers by early July (maybe sooner) and have it for sale in our store and on our merch table for August. We will be extending the Clubhouse until January 1, 2013, so there is no hurry for anyone that has subscribed to download everything, just yet. We will be emailing all of the Clubhouse subscribers in the next couple of weeks to make sure that their mailing addresses are still the same as when they signed up…and, oh ya, the book is going to be beeeeauuuutiful.
While we were on tour in February and March, Jeff put together a video for “Unanswered Letter” (off of The Wilderness album). The video is made up of images that Jeff captured while on that tour and then filtered through one of Mr Job’s more ingenuous pieces of software. Enjoy.
If you haven’t been paying attention then you probably haven’t noticed the treasure trove of recordings, exclusive to our site, stored in the EXCLUSIVES section. My favourite area of this important corner of our world is Cookie Crumbs (volumes 1 thru 10). These collections of live songs are curated by Cookie Bob who is a passionate taper of live music and someone who has attended close to 200 Cowboy Junkies performance: he has an excellent ear for the passion and nuance of a good live performance and each time we travel through the North East he generously provides us with a tin of the tastiest ginger snap cookies EVER made. We just posted Volume 10 (Underdogs) of his series. It’s a collection of songs, reaching back 25 years, that briefly made their way in to our repertoire and have either disappeared forever from our set or are rarely played.From my point of view it’s a gas to listen to, to hear the different musicians doing their thing, to hear Margo’s voice and style getting deeper and more intense. Take a listen for free, “share” the player around and, if you have eight bucks to spare, buy a copy….we fully appreciate and rely on your patronage.
This past March we made our ninth appearance on the venerable NPR show, Mountain Stage. It’s always a pleasure to journey to the heart of West Virginia to hook up with our old friends. the show will be aired this friday (May 18th) on participating NPR stations (a list of participating stations and air times can be found here) and next week it will be posted and archived at NPR.org/mountainstage.
