A Year of Blind Spots: The Trinity Session

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

The Trinity Session

Cowboy Junkies

1988

Sometimes you arrive at music for completely arbitrary reasons. Sometimes you arrive because you're meant to be there. Sometimes it's both. I'd like to view the reason I'm even aware of Cowboy Junkies' existence as a mixture of fate and happenstance. After all, I chose to know and love the National as a band, and I chose to know every lyric that Matt Berninger mutters into that mic, but he could've chosen any band to mention in "Eucalyptus." He didn't have to say "What about the Cowboy Junkies? What about the Afghan Whigs?" He had no reason to know or care that I was familiar with the latter (and not completely sold on them), but had no idea who the former was, and remained perplexed through every hackneyed album review of First Two Pages of Frankenstein that chose to mention this lyric specifically as some sort of harbinger of the eventual downfall of the National as an institution. I figured maybe it would behoove me to just seek it out for myself.

I guess, based on that one single lyric only, I was expecting the gruff and grungy sort of alt-rock that Afghan Whigs offer up. Or maybe some yee-haw Western rock, just based on the name of the damn band. This album is... really far from all that, actually. It's some of the quietest and most rustic roots-folk I've ever heard. The story—ever-important in this long-running blog column—hits the right spot for me, and goes a long way in explaining the sound.

Cowboy Junkies are from Canada, and they did a lot of touring through America for their debut album. For their sophomore effort, they wanted to cover a lot of the rock and country music that they had been exposed to in the Southern U.S. To record The Trinity Session, they set up shop in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, for one single day. Everyone crowded around one microphone. The sparser songs were recorded first, and acoustic issues were fixed as they went along. In the end, they had to pay a security guard $25 to get an extra two hours (and this was after they already lied to the church owners, saying they were a religious group recording a Christmas special).

The results feel, if anything, extremely authentic. The closest analogy I have from previous Blind Spots featured here—and take this as you will, though I mean it as a compliment—is Come Away with Me by Norah Jones. It's smoky coffee house music, but it's the best of what smoky coffee house music has to offer. Cowboy Junkies don't just tone down VU's "Sweet Jane," they reinvent it for their own aesthetic. They stretch back even further than that and manage to make "Blue Moon" feel essential, which, if you asked me, would've been a tall ask (especially since the song is apparently "for Elvis," which really put me on edge at first). 

The fact that it was recorded in a day (mostly, I should say, as some vocals were recorded during a lunch break a few days later) is something that appeals to me in a creative sense. I like hearing stories about geniuses taking years or decades to create their masterpiece, but I think I like just as much the idea that a band is attempting to capture genius in the moment, during an ultra-specific moment in time. On November 27, 1987, Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" sounded like this, but who knows how it might have sounded in 1988, 1999, 2025. (There is apparently a 2007 version of the album, but Ryan Adams was part of the package for that, so let's not talk about it.) Somehow, getting to know an artist or a band through one single day of their lives makes it even more appealing to know more. What did Cowboy Junkies sound like on other days? Similar to this? Or did they never return to this sound, these feelings?

I want to say that this is good summer evening music, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that. It would've been different if the album was recorded on a patio somewhere. No, it was recorded in a dimly lit church, everyone huddled close. If anything, this is a great winter album, when we're staying warm inside. The Trinity Session, I would imagine, is a good way to keep warm. It's a hygge album, basically! Maybe that's what Berninger should've mentioned in that National song. It wouldn't have taken me years to follow up on his offer if that was the case.