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Friends since kindergarten, Michael and Alan shared records and formed a band in high school. At "about 18 or 19," they went semipro, putting together an outfit called Hunger Project, which moved from Toronto to New York City in 1980. They tried, mostly unsuccessfully. to make a living playing adaptations of the kind of fierce rock that was then coming out of England. "The kids in England had a lot to growl about," Michael recalls. "We didn't. We were middle class. We didn't really hook into the philosophy of the music so much as the expression." Finally landing in England in 1981, Anton and Timmins found the rock scene there "pretentious and unreceptive to any outsiders. Innovation was the squeal of a car brake." The boys lasted four years. They had a band called Germinal, in which guitar, bass, drum and sax "all did whatever, all at the same time. It was the ultimate release for us. But for the audience, it was quite a chore."
Besides taxing the audience, Germinal helped Anton and Timmins blow their own circuitry so that it was ready for a more delicate rewiring. "We'd got the aggressiveness out of our system," Michael says. "Now we could think about our music -- and leave some spaces in it." Back in Toronto again, working out of a rehearsal space inside his brother Pete's garage, Michael started to work up the meditative, mood-ridden sound of the Cowboy Junkies. Pete was recruited to play drums. Margo, whose previous vocal experience was confined to school pageants, was coaxed into singing. The garage walls were covered with carpeting so the neighbors wouldn't complain. "That's where a lot of the quietness of the Cowboy Junkies comes from," says Michael, almost with a straight face. "It's from not wanting to disturb the neighbors."
Their first album, released in 1986, got a modest cult going for the band, but The Trinity Session landed them a big-time deal with RCA. They are planning a new album, with a folkier influence, to be recorded early next year, and will be making occasional touring forays into the States before they return to the studio. Don't expect to tune in immediately, though. "We don't show everything," Michael Timmins says. "We keep a little bit hidden." That's the solution to the mystery of the Cowboy Junkies, then: they may not show what's hidden, but they surely can play it.