Is it possible to have two shows in the category of “show of the week” within the same week?

My good pal Stereo Dictator once said something about “my site, my rules” or something along those lines, so I’m going to go with it. (Actually, he said “my stereo, my albums, my choice,” but you get my point.)  Plus, we’re talking about the Cowboy Junkies who have provided plenty of CanCon content for my musical collection, alongside Barenaked Ladies, Blue Rodeo, Tom Cochrane….you get the point.  I was kinda joking about Cochrane, but you go ahead and tell me that “Lunatic Fringe” isn’t a bad ass tune.

The Junkies are in town on Saturday night at the Ohio Theatre.  I haven’t seen ’em since 1996 at the Odeon, and I’ve certainly missed plenty of opportunities since that show, which sent me appropriately enough into full-on Junkies addiction.  In the weeks following that show, I slowly began to acquire all of the pieces of the Junkies catalog that were missing from my musical stash.

25 years into their musical quest, Cowboy Junkies have an interesting adventure on tap:

Over the next 18 months (May 1, 2010 – Nov 1, 2011, give or take a few weeks), we will be releasing four albums, which will collectively be called The Nomad Series. The idea was born in the tumult of a perfect storm of ideas, influences, inspirations and timing. We have just launched our new website and want to put it through its paces. For the first time in twenty years we are completely free of any recording contracts and obligations, we find ourselves writing and recording more than we have in years, our studio (The Clubhouse) feels more and more like home, the band now has twenty five years under the hood and is sounding so darn good…and then, added in to that mix, our friend Enrique Martinez Celaya, the brilliant and inspired Cuban-American painter, dropped these four spectacular paintings (a series of paintings called “Nomad”) into our laps, and it became clear that we needed to release four albums, with his paintings as our ground. And that we needed the challenge of doing so under an intense release schedule.

So if you’ve been wondering what’s next for the Junkies?  There’s your answer!  It sounds like our musical ears will be busy in the months to come.

The second volume of the four planned albums is personally interesting to me:

Demons (volume 2): for some time now we have been batting around the idea of doing an album of conceptually linked cover songs (anyone who has followed us over the years knows that we love our cover songs and that they are a big part of who we are), but we couldn’t find that key that made sense to any of us. And then, this past Christmas, our friend Vic Chesnutt died. We had been discussing with Vic, off and on for the past couple of years, about doing a Chesnutt/Junkies album. During one of the last conversation that I had with Vic, he mentioned that he was working on a series of songs about his childhood that he wanted to bring to the collaboration. So, it only seems fitting that we record an album of Vic’s songs. His catalogue is so deep and for the most part, so overlooked. It will be a labour of love.

The complete Cowboy Junkies tour schedule can be found here.