Review: Cowboy Junkies at Astor Theatre

Cowboy Junkies at Astor Theatre
Tuesday, November 18, 2025

It’s been 26 years since Cowboy Junkies last performed in Perth. And if the Canadians’ most recent album, Such Ferocious Beauty, isn’t sufficient testament to the band’s continued relevance and standing, their sold-out performance at the Astor Theatre on Tuesday night certainly was. Billed as An Evening With Cowboy Junkies Celebrating 40 Years, the Toronto-based ensemble played sans support, spreading their performance across two enthralling sets.

The first set featured a suite of exquisitely executed songs from their latest release, which not only provided an insight into the depth of the band’s musical gravitas but also firmly underlined its compositional prowess. Having eased their way into the laconic atmospherics of Knives, the rhythmic salvo and swirling electric guitar of Hard to Build, Easy to Break raised the musical temperature before the band brought it back down again with the airy acoustics of Circe and Penelope.

Cowboy Junkies have long occupied a space beyond the traditional genre-defining slipstreams, and, with Such Ferocious Beauty, the five-piece have embellished its customary sweet sadness with the kind of worldly wisdom that could only come with 40 years of experience.

The ensemble opened the night with two songs from their 1988 breakthrough release, The Trinity Sessions. Mike Timmins’ gentle wash of electric guitar and the alternating harmonica and mandolin from Jeff Bird provided Misguided Angel with an alluring footing for Margo Timmins’ exquisite vocals. In a night brimming with musical magic, one of the most poignant came at the song’s culmination. As the music muted, Margo Timmins floated out one last line, with her words forlornly hanging in the air.

A sultry rendering of The Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane was met with a ravenous reception from the audience, giving the band sufficient encouragement to delve into the trio of songs from Such Ferocious Beauty. After thanking the audience for its embrace of the new material, the band then delivered a rendition of A Common Disaster from 1996’s Lay It Down that was as haunting as it was infectious before delving back a decade to their debut album, Whites Off Earth Now, to close out the opening set with Forgive Me.

There was a moment in the band’s first set where Margo Timmins coyly suggested the math surrounding Cowboy Junkies’ 40th anniversary didn’t quite add up. “I must have been 16 when we started,” she said with a smirk. Nonetheless, with no lineup changes, the band’s endurance is an achievement in itself, but as you delve into their discography, the depth and breadth of its oeuvre quickly proves as impressive as the band’s longevity.

To open their second set, Cowboy Junkies turned to the edgy My Little Basquiat from the equally capricious 2007 release, At the End of Paths Taken, before a rollicking serving of harmonica and some countrified guitar imparted Cause Cheap is How I Feel with a touch of twang. Hailing from the 1990 album Caution Horses, the song also demonstrated how deftly Margo Timmins can lace her vocal temperament to affect the mood. From the ethereal defiance of My Little Basquiat to the laconic resignation of Cause Cheap is How I Feel, her hauntingly beautiful voice perfectly directed each song’s inclination.

Returning to The Trinity Sessions with Dreaming My Dreams With You, the band again slowed the tempo. Mike Timmins’ beautifully sombre guitar lines mimicked Margo Timmins’ vocal lament to give the song a slow ache before 3rd Crusade from Sing in My Meadow resumed the musical insurgence. As the instrumentalists drifted into an oscillating blaze of sound, Margo Timmins stood head bowed with her hands draped over the microphone stand, sporadically interjecting muted vocalising to further the tension during what morphed into an epic sonic assault.

Having already appeased the audience with Sweet Jane, bassist Alan Anton and drummer Peter Timmins disappeared backstage ‘to talk about hockey and baseball,’ leaving Mike and Margo Timmins and Jeff Bird to further the interpretive prowess via acoustic renditions of Neil Young’s Powderfinger and Townes Van Zandt’s Rake. While Margo Timmins explained it’s a rite of passage for every Canadian band to perform a Neil Young song when touring overseas, the inclusion of Rake harks back to the band’s empathetic support of Van Zandt in the early 1990s.

Following the release of its 1990 album The Caution Horses, Cowboy Junkies plucked the embattled Van Zandt from the bars of Texas and took him on the road, giving the singer-songwriter’s music a platform in a slew of ornate theatres across North America. While Van Zandt died a few years later, his musical spirit is never too far away, with their mutual admiration cemented in songs like Van Zandt’s Cowboy Junkies Lament and Cowboy Junkies’ Townes’ Blues.

Ghosts have long lingered in the Cowboy Junkies’ orbit. Following his untimely death in 2009, the ensemble recorded a heartfelt album of songs by collaborator Vic Chesnutt, while the siblings’ father’s slow decline into dementia and recent passing permeates Such Ferocious Beauty. Drawing again on that album, the trio rounded out its acoustic sojourn with Shadows 2, which glowed in a melancholic warmth. Maintaining the ethereal overtones, the return of the rhythm section imparted Missing Children from All That Reckoning with a harder edge before the second set was closed out with the exquisite Good Friday from Miles from Our Home and Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis) from The Trinity Sessions.

The band returned for a two-song encore and put its understated mastery on full display. Bea’s Song from Lay It Down ached in tempered brilliance, while a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s State Trooper from Whites Off Earth Now was delivered with as much dark and brooding poise as the band could muster. The ending was so heavy, in fact, that Margo Timmins felt compelled to lighten the mood by handing out flowers to the audience as the rest of the band disappeared off stage.

BRETT LEIGH DICKS

Photos by Linda Dunjey