Rena's Cowboy

Ghosts is an album by the Canadian alt-country band Cowboy Junkies, released digitally on March 30, 2020. The album features eight songs that process the loss of the Timmins siblings' mother who died in 2018.

Long admired for the carefully chosen cover versions of songs that have been part of their repertoire from the very beginning, Cowboy Junkies release Songs of the Recollection, consisting of nine covers both newly recorded and curated from previous album projects. Michael Timmins recalls, "Long before we were musicians, we were music fans. We didn't grow up sitting around the kitchen table playing instruments and harmonising. We grew up sitting around the record player listening to each other's record collections and having our minds blown. This was the passion that we shared. Our goal has always been to create music that took hold of the listener the way that this music took hold of us. These are some of the songs and some of the artists that found their way into our lives and eventually into our repertoire over the past fifty years." This inspired, and inspiring, collection features tracks from David Bowie, Neil Young, Gram Parsons, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Vic Chesnutt and The Cure.

While “Cowboy Outfit” has a slightly different meaning as UK Slang, Nick Lowe and His Cowboy Outfit marks a turn towards a more rootsy persona for our hero. Anchored by the international number one “Half a Boy and Half a Man”, the album introduces a tex-mex/roller-rink organ sound, although the lineup of Bobby Irwin, Paul Carrack, Martin Belmont and Lowe is essentially unchanged. Newly discovered Johnny Horton covers “Honky Tonk Hardwood Floor” and “Walk on By” (included here as bonus tracks) show that there may have been a more twangy intention to the record– but as it is full on rockers like “Maureen” and Mickey Jupp’s “You’ll Never Get Me Up (in One of Those)” rub shoulders with pop like Dusty Springfield’s “Breakaway” and Nick’s own “L.A.F.S.” (featuring the TKO Horns who had recently punched up arranger Elvis Costello’s own “Everyday I Write the Book”).