Cowboy Junkies
200 More Miles: Live Performances 1985-1994

THE REVIEW

How many years have passed, I don't know, or maybe I don't want to know. Rome, a moonlit evening, certainly, the concert has just ended. And I'm there, waiting for her near the bus that will take her back to the hotel. She arrives, she approaches me, I had promised myself to do it, to tell her those words, I had thought about it so much. Her long hair, her gaze of a tender cowgirl (forgive me the term) suspended between the earth and the moon, she comes closer and looks at me, I hear someone behind whispering: "your fan is waiting for you." And indeed I was waiting for her. To see her, to talk to her. But the monkey of my shyness decides once again to jump on me and ruin everything, therefore, with a look that I imagine was between the foolish and the inane, I can only watch her in silence as she boards the bus, while she throws me the sweetness of a smile into the air, somewhere between grateful and compassionate.

Margo Timmins, where are you tonight? Borrowing from one of the album titles.

One of the most ethereal and sensual voices in the entire history of music, and I'm not exaggerating.

Knowing how to ignite the dream dimension, transform the existing, is what I have always sought in music. Feeling transported to another dimension, to a parallel world. And there are so many forms of music that have given me access to this, even very different from each other. Among them is the never cloying sweetness of this Canadian group, which knows how to paint with great emotional intensity notes of languid and soft colors, but always true, with soft and calm rhythms that magically tune into the frequencies of the soul, the body, nature, the world, as few have been able to do. Because the rhythm of the earth, our rhythm, is bradycardic, this is certain. Then we can make it accelerate as much as we want, inject it with adrenaline, but all this is not sustainable, it is an artifice.

The opening of this double live CD is the splendid cover of the song Blue Moon by Elvis (which is itself a reinterpretation of what is a true popular song), where the bass and harmonica are the sound humus in which Margo's sinuous warmth materializes as she whispers:

Maybe in the new May sun
my baby will return to my arms
I'll hold him close to me
I want my baby back with me
because he's my true love

Following that is Two Hundred More Miles, a delicate ballad that tells us of a long dream pursued, towards an objective perhaps nonexistent for others, but not for the one who sees it, and is ready to reach it, at the end of a night journey, along 200 miles of paved rain:

They say I'm crazy
but I wouldn't trade all your golden tomorrows
for an hour of this night
scared or dead and cold
but I heard there's a light
pulling me to reach an end

Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning is the awakening the day after a goodbye, balanced between the bitter realization of the loss and the inevitability of a necessary choice, and the sun rises again, straight into your eyes.

Where are you tonight? is a sweet lullaby soaring in the sky of a world where hope can still fly, beyond every summit, and Margo's sigh still breathes the theme of the dream, the search for what frees us, the will not to surrender to the mediocrity of the ordinary:

When I left you in my dreams last night
you promised we would be free
Where are you tonight?
You tell me of back roads
and how we'll drive all night
how the days will fade and the moon will remain suspended forever
and the cloud of dust we will raise will remain like a song
And the myth of the two who refused to give up will grow

The cover of Sweet Jane by Lou Reed is a serpent inexorably coiling around your thoughts, or what you believe they are, ignoring the fact that it is slowly bringing you the light, or death (there's actually no difference), while Lost my driving wheel tells us that that journey (yes, it's the same), has suddenly been interrupted, but for a very specific reason:

My car broke down in Texas
suddenly stopped in its tracks
I called just to tell you I need you
I called just to tell you how I feel
I feel like an old engine that's lost the wheel
An old engine that's lost the driving wheel

Misguided angel perhaps reveals what the goal was, what the mission was, chased mile after mile:

Misguided angel hanging over me
Heart like a Gabriel, pure and white as ivory
Soul like a Lucifer, black and cold as a piece of lead
Misguided angel, I love you until I'm dead

A seductive, hypnotic, melancholic advance, sometimes catatonic, narcoleptic, alternating with some more expansive sound rides, in which the Cowboy Junkies further demonstrate their exquisite level as fine musicians. Slowcore, those in the know call it. And when in 1994 the Low, among the founding fathers of this style, released their first masterpiece album "I could live in hope," where bass and guitar spiral in a vortex illuminating the 9:46 minutes of pure sonic hypnosis of Lullaby, by then the Cowboy Junkies had already paved the way, the masters are them. In painting a humanity that lives, suffers, loves, and mends the tears of pain with the tension of the dream, with the evocative power of thought, following the magical wave of a slow vibration, which brings the beats back to the essence, to what simplicity gives us, to that act of spontaneous and warm empathy that emanates from a human being's smile.

Like Margo's smile.