Sunday News (Lancaster, PA)
Publication Date: October 14, 2007
By MaryAlice Bitts
First encounters can be deceiving, as Alan Anton and Michael Timmins can attest.
"I think I punched him," said Anton, who befriended Timmins in kindergarten in their native Toronto. "I made a strong first impression."
It's a good thing he did. Today, these childhood friends form half of the Cowboy Junkies, a genre-blurring country/rock/folk band that, in an industry wracked with career-ending excesses and messy personal battles, has maintained its original, amicable lineup for more than 20 years.
The secret, Anton said, is in the band's collective DNA.
The Junkies' story begins in the mid-1980s, when songwriter/guitarist Timmins and bass player Anton, two well-spoken 20-somethings with odd jobs and a passion for popular music, decided to form a punk band. When that band folded prematurely, they tried to form another, but the chemistry wasn't quite right.
So they enlisted two of Timmins' five siblings, Margo on vocals and Pete on drums, to form a new band that worked. Suddenly, Anton found himself the only musician onstage with maverick genes.
The band crafted a new, hypnotic hybrid of brooding, introspective storytelling mixed with understated alternative-rock vocals and stripped-down country arrangements. Years before the alt-country craze swept North America, the aptly named Cowboy Junkies hit the scene.
From the beginning, the band was a distinct voice in Canadian rock. Within three years, the Cowboy Junkies signed with RCA Records and released the atmospheric breakthrough album, "The Trinity Sessions," which the band recorded in one night in Toronto's Holy Trinity Church, sharing a single microphone.
With hits like "Misguided Angel" and the Velvet Underground cover "Sweet Jane" (a track later featured in the Oliver Stone film "Natural Born Killers"), the album was an instant college radio favorite, and the Cowboy Junkies earned an international following in the alternative music scene.
Anton said it was a heady (reasonably heady) time.
"When you're in a band, everyone just assumes the worst in terms of rock 'n' roll lifestyle. But we've always been very level-headed and kind of boring, to tell you the truth, as far as that goes," he said. "We were around 26 when we hit the big time, as they say, so we weren't kids. We had our heads on straight, or straightish, and we were able to just keep focusing on the music."
The Cowboy Junkies recorded eight more albums over the next 14 years before taking a hiatus to spend more time with their young children. For a band rooted in family, this seemed a natural decision.
"It's hard for any parent, in any job, to find a balance [between work and family], but for us, it's a bigger deal because we're on the road a lot," he said. "It's like we're traveling salesmen. We just wanted to be there when they were small."
So they adjusted, and even embraced family-guy hobbies. ("Pete is a 'This Old House' kind of guy. It's unbelievable," Anton said. "He's got every tool known to man, and in his spare time, he redoes his friends' kitchens.") When their children reached school age, they eased back into a touring and recording schedule and released three albums on their own label.
The band's current projects echo the passions and preoccupations of their largely settled-down, anti-rock star lives.
A 20th anniversary "Trinity Sessions" DVD (to be released this year in the United States), celebrates the band's shared history. Recorded live in Holy Trinity Church with guest musicians Natalie Merchant, Vic Chesnutt and Ryan Adams, the DVD was a nail-biting, but ultimately satisfying trip down memory lane for Anton.
"We didn't expect any kind of musical intimacy because there were a hundred people with lights and dolly tracks and cameras and the whole thing. We thought it would be way too invasive, and we just hoped we'd get through it," he said. "But we'd forgotten what an amazing space the church is. It sounded beautiful."
In April, the Cowboy Junkies released a highly personal album, "At the End of Paths Taken," which contains an overarching family theme.
"It's probably the first time we've ever put a theme onto an album," said Anton, who describes himself as the "inside outsider" of the Timmins family. "It's fitting because the one thing that has held the band together is that it is a family to begin with. And it is a very tight-knit family."
Indeed, five of the six grown Timmins siblings, and their parents, live within six square blocks of each other. Only sister Cali, who moved to California to star in the soap opera "Ryan's Hope," strayed from home.
Four decades after he introduced himself to the greater Timmins family through an auspicious show of mini-machismo, Anton said "Paths Taken" represents a distinct time of life for the band.
"I guess this is where we all are right now," Anton said. "We are all in our 40s, and we all have aging parents and our own children. [The album] is pretty close to the bone."
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Music and life: risky businesses eachSinger-songwriter Patty Larkin tackles bothSunday News (Lancaster, PA)
Publication Date: April 29, 2007
By MaryAlice Bitts
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If you had grabbed a snack in Patty Larkin's Cape Cod, Mass., home a few years back, you would have spied a sage and hope-tinged note taped to the refrigerator that read: "Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk."
"It was a quote from an open letter from the Dalai Lama that I found very inspiring at the time because I was going through some big changes," said Larkin, who was then in the process of adopting her first daughter and simultaneously anticipating the release of her 2003 album "Red=Luck." "It's something I was very attracted to, and tried to remember."
The attraction makes sense. Larkin is a time-tested, guitar-based singer/songwriter who continues to brave new horizons, earning praise for her unconventional arrangements and bold, sometimes anxiety-ridden, sometimes playful language.
Larkin will open Friday night for fellow singer/songwriter Jeffrey Gaines at Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater in Harrisburg.
The show will feature well-known Larkin hits, as well as new songs she's written over the past six months - her first writing spurt since penning the tracks for the richly textured, ethnically inspired "Red=Luck."
Larkin said the time between albums has been challenging in many ways.
"It's an interesting cycle," Larkin said in a telephone interview from her home. "It's a very empty, very depressing feeling whenever I'm not writing something new. It's the depths of nothingness. You just have to get yourself back into writing, somehow."
But that's not always as easy as it seems. In her four years away from the recording studio, Larkin has been busy producing a compilation record of women guitarists, promoting her favorite charities and collaborating with other artists.
And then there is her most rewarding risk: Over the past four years, Larkin and her partner have adopted two young children, an all-consuming life change that has made her "more tired, but a lot happier."
Despite the thrill of being a new mother, the artist in Larkin still longed to write. So last September, Larkin arranged for a baby sitter to come for three hours a day. Then she rented out an old icehouse in Cape Cod and went to work.
"It was in the middle of nowhere, and it had bad wiring," Larkin said. "It was perfect."
It took her a few weeks to get back in the groove, but she knew she was on the right track.
"I think that, for me, I listen and I wait. I know when it's starting to kind of bubble up again - the fire is starting to light again - and I have a desire to write something. It has to do with being open to hearing beauty and wanting to re-create that," she said. "Once it starts, I just write and write."
This writing process is a familiar one for Larkin, an Iowa native who grew up in Milwaukee in a musical family that prized creativity. Larkin took piano and guitar lessons as a child and later earned an English literature degree at the University of Oregon, followed by a music degree at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music.
The move to Beantown proved fruitful for the young musician, who took several Boston-based music awards and was presented with an auspicious honor when the mayor of Boston declared a citywide "Patty Larkin Appreciation Day." The day was designed to recognize not only Larkin's musical accomplishments, but also to honor her charitable works. It also was an incredible treat.
"When it happened I was choked up," said Larkin, who sang the national anthem at Fenway Park that day and also donated part of the proceeds from her newly released album to AIDS research. "I just remember driving all through Boston and hanging out the window calling out, 'It's my day! It's my day!'" Larkin said, laughing. "By the end of the evening, my friends were saying, 'Will you just stop?'"
In the subsequent decade, she's released folk-rock/neo-folk albums that show off her mastery of the guitar and brim with her English major's passion for language and her droll sense of humor. She's also continued to devote attention to causes she believes in, such as AIDS research and arts education.
Larkin's forthright idealism spills into her work. At the end of 2005, she produced "La Guitara: Gender Bending Strings," an out-of-the-mainstream, well-received compilation of recordings by 14 archival and contemporary female guitarists from around the world, including Larkin, Wu Man, Sharon Isbin, Memphis Minnie, Mimi Fox, Kaki King and Ellen McIlwaine.
Larkin said she took on the project to help women musicians claim the traditionally male instrument as their own. A benefit tour in 2006 followed, and proceeds helped to fund the Guitars in the Classroom educational program.
"It's blossomed into this sort of special, International Women's Day kind of celebration," said Larkin, who is working with co-producer Bette Warner to release a second "La Guitara" album and to develop an accompanying music education program. "Now they have new guitars that are made specifically for girls and women. It's so exciting and inspiring."
Like "Red=Luck" and, she assured, her yet-to-be-named follow-up album, "La Guitara" was an offbeat project that did not ensure widespread success, but was important to her personally. Which hearkens back to the idea of risk and reward.
"I think I've always tried to stretch the boundaries and borders of the kind of music I do. I think, if anything, I've pushed that a bit, and it can be pushed even further," she said.
As she sidles up to her 22nd anniversary in the music industry, Larkin envisions herself embracing risk with a measure of hope for some time to come.
"It's interesting because I always kidded that you're up-and-coming for 12 years, and then you're kind of like a survivor. That's where I am. And then, if I can hang on past 35 years," she joked, "maybe I'll get to the icon status."
Labels: anton, cowboy junkies, mary alice bitts, MaryAlice Bitts, patty larkin, timmons
