On ‘Such Ferocious Beauty,’ Cowboy Junkies look at the brutal splendour of life

Nothing ever goes quite the way you planned.

Just ask Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins: his band’s new album, “Such Ferocious Beauty,” out Friday, ended up being a little louder and more vibrant than intended.

Timmins, who shares the band with his siblings Margo and Peter, and his friend Alan Anton, rented a cabin near Margo’s place north of the city a few years back to begin the creative process for the album, the band’s 14th original studio effort and 35th overall.

“This record, when I started writing it, was during COVID and I rented a small barn near Margo because we really couldn’t get together as a band,” Michael Timmins said. “It was just vocal and acoustic guitar for the first few months of making this record, and my purest thought was that this was going to be a much quieter, gentler record.

“But it kind of went 180 degrees.”

Everything changed once bassist Anton offered his input.

“Alan got involved with it and he had some ideas,” said Timmins. “When he brought those in, I felt that I had to step up with what I was doing with guitar: get the amp and the pedals and the electric out in order to complement what he was doing.

“We do have a sense of where we want to go, but if something makes sense or dictates another direction, we’re willing to follow that. That’s definitely what happened with this record.”

As a result, “Such Ferocious Beauty” offers some of the most intense, electrifying and aggressive sonic rock soundscapes in the Cowboy Junkies canon.

Since their early days of playing the Beverley Tavern and the recording-under-one-microphone era that spawned 1986’s “Whites Off Earth Now” and 1987’s “The Trinity Session,” the Canadian Music Hall of Fame members — who perform at the Danforth Music Hall on Oct. 3 — have been something of an anomaly.

They’ve evolved their preliminary alt-country/alt-rock concoction from its subdued intimacy into a more amplified and pronounced exploration of moods and styles, quite a progression for a band known for both its originals and its covers, with Michael Timmins serving as its lyrical conscience throughout its 37-year legacy.

If there’s a theme that sums up “Such Ferocious Beauty,” it’s transience — with much of it focused on loss.

“‘Impermanence’ is the word I’ve been using lately,” said Timmins. “We lost our mother three years ago and our dad this past June. The album was written about a year before he died, but he also suffered from dementia, so there’s a sense of loss there.

“And as you get old, there are things that you begin to lose, like friends and a sense of the world around you, the world you know and the world you’ve experienced.

“Also, sociologically, the times, we can see a lot of things going away.”

Timmins said a Cowboy Junkies album usually reflects a snapshot of his life; a therapeutic outlet of sorts.

“I’ve always written that way,” he said.

“Such Ferocious Beauty” is “more of a direct analysis or metaphor for life.”

“There are circumstances in life that can be pretty brutal but can also have beauty,” he explained. “There’s the physical nature of life and then just the heavy idea that there’s a constant, a never-ending flow. There’s something beautiful about that.”

Of course there are hiccups. The song titled after one-time boxing champion “Mike Tyson,” for instance, addresses the adage of how someone makes plans and God laughs.

“The reason I titled that song is because that opening line — ‘Every man has a plan until you punch them in the mouth’ — is a variation of a Mike Tyson quote,” Timmins said. “A few (people) were asking him, when he was at the height of his career, whether boxers have these plans because, when they faced him, they all seem to get knocked out in 15 seconds.

“And his response, was, ‘Yeah, they all have a plan until I punch them in the nose.’ I thought that was a really good description of life. Everybody has these plans about what they want to do and how they want to approach it, and then something in life punches them in the mouth or in the nose and then things change, you know?”

The slightly funky “Hard to Build. Easy to Break” draws attention to the fragility of institutions, whether tangible like an organization or intangible like a reputation.

“That song is sort of the macro look at society,” Timmins said. “So whether it’s reputation or something as big as democracy, you know, it’s very hard to build a democracy and it’s very easy to break it.

“My view, sociologically, is that’s it’s just very easy to break something and much harder to adjust something and make it work, create it and build it.”

And although the album-ending acoustic ballad “Blue Skies” is intended to be a song of hope, Timmins said Margo had a different perspective.

“She looked at it as a very sad and pessimistic viewpoint,” said Timmins. “And I started writing it as a positive thing: the idea that you can go about your life spending all of it looking for blue skies, for those happy days or for something better, but when you get there you’re going to be in the same place.

“It’s really about appreciating what’s in front of you, the moment you’re living in, where you are. So, to me, it’s an optimistic song in that you don’t have to spend all your time thinking tomorrow is going to be any better; just make today better.”

Timmins, an avid fly fisherman when he isn’t pursuing all things Cowboy Junkies, says another key element of “Such Ferocious Beauty” are the subjects of aging and control over your own destiny.

“We’re all getting up there and you begin to look at your life differently,” he said. “Children are growing up and getting older, and they start setting out on their path, so it’s about where one is in one’s life and how one is viewing the world.

“There’s this weird kind of flux that we’ve come to be in. All those things add up to a sense of impermanence: where you kind of realize that nothing is forever, you know? The other thing is that it’s all made up; you kind of make it all up as you go along. And as you get older, you begin to realize that more and more.”

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