Riding high

Calling from her home in Toronto, Margo notes, "After every show, we invite people to stick around and say hello. Often people come up and say, `God, you're not as sad as your records!' For some, that may be a disappointment. The younger fans want you to be that brooding.

"Also, people think our live shows will be as quiet and low-key as our albums. Actually, the dynamic range is a lot larger than what you hear on the album."

The musicians have reason to be happy these days. Their sixth studio release, Lay It Down (Geffen), finds them with a new record label (they've switched from RCA), a new producer (John Keane, who's recorded R.E.M. and Indigo Girls), and as clear a sense of purpose as they've had since they first achieved notice with the haunting The Trinity Session in 1988. Yet the music is as somber as ever, marked by the band's trademark mixture of the country lonesomeness of Hank Williams and the after-hours desolation of the Velvet Underground. The many stories of love gone dead are carried by Michael's tasteful, Sterling Morrison-like guitar craftsmanship and Margo's languid clarity, which even on more upbeat melodies ("Angel Mine") conveys a "Lonely Sinking Feeling," in the words of another song title.

With their celebrated cover of the Velvets' "Sweet Jane" having appeared on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, the cinematic nature of the Junkies' music seems more evident than ever on Lay It Down. Margo takes a Method-acting approach to the characters Michael creates in his story-songs. She explains, "When I sing a song, I have a story laid out in my brain, a small film. For example, in `Bea's Song,' I can see Bea and her husband, John. I know what they look like, what the house they live in looks like, and where she's sitting on the river. It's as clear as if I could see it out the window. But I don't know if those are the same images Michael has. He doesn't tell me. And I really don't want to know because it would affect the way I go about the song. Sometimes I might call upon my own experiences with an emotion and put myself in the song."

She makes some daring acting choices that pay off, such as "Come Calling," another soured-relationship tale which she sings in two versions, one breezily wistful, from the man's point of view, and one painfully slow and anguished, from the woman's. On "Now I Know," she lets her otherwise meticulous voice crack repeatedly on the line "Now I know what it means to be broken."

The band wrote the songs for this album during a two-week retreat in a cabin, then recorded outside Toronto for the first time, at Keane's home studio in Athens, Georgia. Still, Margo says, they weren't attempting to duplicate the hermetic conditions behind Trinity, which was recorded inside a church, with a single microphone, over a single day. That day was a serendipitous fluke, she says. "There wasn't even really an intention of putting a record together. We just happened to have the tape machine going, and we played really well that day, and by the end of the day, we had an album. A lot of bands have a great day like that in rehearsal or live on stage one night, and they just wish they had the machine going because they know it's not going to happen again for a long time.

"Record executives have tried to get another Trinity Session out of us. If we tried to say, `This sound really sells. Let's stick with it,' I don't think we'd be together at this point. We would have all gotten bored with the whole thing. We had another way to go. Everything we've done, I've loved. If they haven't sold as many as they could have, too bad. I'm satisfied with my career, and I'm satisfied with my music."

Still, after all the restless sonic experimentation of their intermediate albums, Lay It Down finds them returning to the stripped-down sound they started with in their Toronto garage a decade ago.

"That's normal in any sort of growth, whether you're looking at a band or your own self," Timmins muses. "When we started off, we were just playing for the sake of playing. We never thought we'd get a record deal. As time went on, we had more opportunities to experiment. We could have sidemen. We could see what a tuba sounded like on this song. That's how you grow, and I hope we haven't finished. I hope we haven't now found a sound and this is going to be it. I hope we continue to experiment."

The Cowboy Junkies perform at the Orpheum Theatre Friday, April 19, with opener Vic Chesnutt.