Latest News
LIVE!
We’ve added some new music to the Music Catalogue section of our website. It’s a limited edition four song EP called LIVE!. It was originally released by BMG in 1992. It’s a very nice little document of one of our favourite tours: the Black Eyed Man tour that we did with John Prine. The EP […]
Renmin Park, volume 1 – Sir Francis Bacon At The Net
(this blog was posted earlier on the NPR All Songs Considered website.) The roots of this song are quite varied and complicated. It started as a musical structure based around the field recording that you hear, which is of two men playing badminton in Renmin Park. Every Tuesday and Thursday I would go to the […]
September / October Tour Dates
We’ll be in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California in late September and early October. Come out and say hello to us in Bellingham, Edmonds and Covington, WA; Vancouver, BC; Bend, Portland and Grants Pass, OR; and Napa and San Francisco, CA.
Renmin Park, volume 1 – Cicadas
On June 4th 1989 we were touring the west coast of the United States, when word escaped from China about the massacre in Tiananmen Square. The world had been watching, there had been this sparkle of hope shining from a country that had been dark to us for so many years. And then it ended […]
Renmin Park, volume 1 – You’ve Got To Get A Good Heart
I can’t really give a definitive idea on what this song is “about” when I was developing the melody for it I came up with the line “you’ve got to get a good heart” I had always intended to replace the line with something else, but after a while the line just felt right. My […]
Renmin Park, volume 1 – Stranger Here
Some songs aren’t really “about” any one thing. Sometimes a song will start off heading in one direction, come to a fork in the path, take the unexpected turn, double back on itself, and then head off through the brush and blaze a completely new trail. Sometimes you write a song or start to write […]
Magnet guest editor
We will be guest editing Magnet on-line this week. To check out our posts as the week progresses you can got to: http://www.magnetmagazine.com/category/guest-editor/ In the meantime there is currently a Q&A with Margo posted at: http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2010/08/23/qa-with-cowboy-junkies-margo-timmins/
Renmin Park, Volume 1 – Mr Liu (Stranger Here, A Few Bags Of Grain, Renmin Park)
The absolutely best part about the three months that we spent in China was the friends that we made. We were greeted with such open arms, invited into people’s homes and shared many meals. The great majority of these people spoke very little English, but that seemed to be of little consequence when it came […]
article published in Beijing newspaper
We recently had a review and an interesting piece about Renmin Park published in the Southern Weekly, which is a Chinese language newspaper that comes out of Beijing. The journalist, Timothy Hathaway, has a very interesting take on the album. He is coming at it with a much more informed perspective on Chinese culture, so […]
Renmin Park, volume 1 – A Walk In The Park
A Walk In The Park is probably one of the songs on Renmin Park that make most people reach for the skip button. But it’s a very important song for the album, probably its most ambitious and, from a producer’s point of view, it’s one of my proudest achievements. The singer and the lyricist of […]