REVIEWS
| Finally got Cowboy Sally over the weekend. My first reaction was, "that's not what she sounds like!" Why is it that her solo studio recordings make her voice sound like she'd been sucking helium? She has such a warm, sultry stage voice.... oh well... back to give it a more serious listen. |
| YEAH! I purchased the disc from Sally herself at a recent Minneapolis performance, rushed home with the memory of her performance still in my mind, spun the sucker, and wondered . . . what happened to the bass? What happened to the "smoke"? It seems as though only the top half of Sally's voice made it onto the latest Cowboy Sally record, although I don't remember having a similar complaint about the EP. |
| Plus, I think it *does* pretty accurately capture the way she sounds, at least at a couple of places we've seen her: vocals way up front, high end turned way up so you can hear her breathing (mmm) ... I loaned it to friends as Sally 101. Now all it needs is some obnoxious yuppie happy hour dude talking in my ear during her set. Oh, wait, that's just when she plays Northern Virginia. |
| Some quotes from Ms. Timms herself about her album: "'What I wanted to make was a very pretty record. it comes out as sad, and somewhat poignant . . . Some of it's quite playful, some of it's camp, and some of it's uneasy.' . . . 'A year ago I reassessed the way I tackle things . . . and came at it in a different way personally,' she says adding that the quiet, sparse arrangements on the album . . . 'gave me a lot of leeway to play with my voice more.'" the quotes are taken from promo material from bloodshot, apparently from a "billboard" article, but it's a bit of a mishmashed photocopy job so it's not absolutely clear. If someone already posted that stuff, then "oops." I haven't been playing terribly close attention to the list of late. Her album took some getting used to for me too, but I really came to like the kind of otherworldly quality of some of the songs; especially the endless, breathy "I believe"s in that one song.(I loaned someone my copy and can't quite remember the title) |
| "I believe" is from "Sweetheart Waltz." When she played at Brownie's as a part of the Bloodshot Records BBQ (this past September), I yelled out for her to do that song, and she said that it was too difficult to do live. (At least with a hangover....) |
| OK, well then, at least I wasn't the only one who thought so then. Hmph. Could have been the mike she used, or could have been a style she was trying for in the studio. However it happened, the results don't do her voice justice. And the revisited cover of "Cry Cry Cry" pales next to the version on the Till Things Get Brighter compilation from a decade ago. Cute cover though. And she was excellent live. Oh well... |
| Just for what it's worth, I feel the same way about *Twilight Laments...*. Blame it on Trumfio, Jon and Sally-they're listed as the producers, with Trumfio also involved in the mixing and mastering of the disc as well. Damn good record, but it just sounds too "precious" to these ears. |
| For the record, I LIKE the sound on the new Timms' disk although it wasn't what I was expecting. I'll take it over the the muddy, bass heavy slough of To the Land of Milk and Honey every time. It's new turf for Sally in a way, and on first listen I thought it to be a tad too quiet and precious. But after multiple listens, I have grown into it and now the ethereal "Sweetheart Waltz" is one of my favorite songs. Twilight Laments adds colors to Sally's vocal palette and bodes well for the future, I think. It takes Sally outside a strictly Mekons context too. All to the good. Her show in Minneapolis was quietly captivating--with lots of humor to leaven the cake. Go Sally. . . . Make more records. . . . |
Sally Timms: Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments...for Lost Buckaroos (Bloodshot) Avoiding Nashville's tacky gloss and the neo-traditionalists' killjoy sobriety, Timms sings old-fashioned country with respect AND a dose of deadpan humor. Segueing deftly from old-school covers (Johnny Cash's "Cry, Cry, Cry") to material by the likes of the Handsome Family and Jill Sobule, the singer's voice stands out wonderfully against the understated arrangements. Look no further the next time you need campfire music.
Grade: B
review by Elizabeth Vincentelli
Village Voice: Published November 17 - 23, 1999
HEY DREAMING COWBOY WITH A BIG OLE TEXAS GRIN
BY ERIC WEISBARD
The Dreaming Cowboy has been away from his home and his woman for 20 years, riding in rodeos. After his body breaks down he stays where he is, far from San Antoine, riding a barstool each night until the lights come up. Amazed at how the years have flown.
The woman singing "Dreaming Cowboy" in a BBC-ready accent has been performing for 20 years too; appeared first on a Pete Shelley record, then enlisted with the country-punk Mekons. She lives in Chicago now, far from En gland, and she's forward about noting that she just turned 40. Inside her new album there's a photo of her holding the baby boy of her ex-lover, Mekon Jon Langford—a prairie godmother. That's Langford crooning "she's a dreaming cowboy," making sure no one is confused. Those Mekons: hearts of steel.
Of course, Sally Timms isn't alone at all. Besides Langford, who's cowritten four new songs with her, her pals in the Handsome Family added two more, including a fine one about a milkman hopelessly in love with the oblivious moon. Robbie Fulks's murder ballad sounds like a page from a collector's songbook. Jeff Tweedy of Wilco brought a genuine folk lyric, with music initially intended for the hallowed Mermaid Avenue sessions; he's probably also playing acoustic guitar under the name Celine on most tracks. That's John Herndon of Tortoise on drums. The good people of Chicago have put more effort into their adoptive sister's album than outsiders might have feared.
Tinted with Hawaiian guitar, the Timms-Langford "Sweetheart Waltz" is so measured and beautiful that something must be wrong. "I, I, I believe, I believe, I believe," Timms sings breathy and soft, stretching the notes out like a dream she can't part with, like her true love left years ago and she's waltzing in a room filled not so much with men as venereal diseases. The song is repeated twice save for a single verse in the center, a terse summary: "Take me down/Spin me 'round/'Til my feet don't touch the ground." We're hearing an incantation, a masquerader's spell against self-awareness.
Sally Timms
Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments ... for Lost Buckaroos
Bloodshot
Which makes "Sweetheart Waltz" a cow boy song too, by the current definition. We know the cowboy mystique has only the loosest of ties to the herders who had a few good years before barbed wire closed off the ranges. On this year's Rounder collection Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls From Texas, featuring 1940s field recordings by John Lomax, one such cattleman makes his feelings clear: "The cowboy's life is a very dreary life...you better stay at home with your kind and loving little wife."
But cowboys, famously, can't stay at home with the little woman. In classic westerns they were tortured about it, but since the 1960s they've stopped apologizing and joined all the other swingers. Midnight cowboys, rhinestone cowboys, Village People cowboys, Bon Jovi cowboys: This year it's Kid Rock's turn. When he sings "I'm a cowboy," he means he's a pimp, and a rock star, and mostly the second coming of rapper Big Daddy Kane circa "Ain't No Half Steppin'." In a different light we'd call that minstrelsy. The Kid slips the charge by adopting a safer form of dress-up.
Hipsters also have their cowboy fetishes; they've moved from Serge Gainsbourg's sub lime saddle frolics on to Lee Hazlewood reissues, most delectably 1970's Cowboy in Sweden. Over some jaunty easy listening, cornpone philosopher Hazlewood duets on "Hey Cow boy" with a Swedish blonde who taunts: "You're just a toy." As he defends himself—"You wind me up and watch what I do to you/I may be small but...no big cowboy can do the little things I do"—I start to wonder if he's actually her vibrator.
Unable to resist an exploded trope, Stephin Merritt cuts in with "Papa Was a Rodeo," the 69 Love Songs song that got the biggest cheers the night I saw him. "Papa was a rodeo, Mama was a rock 'n' roll band," Merritt deadpans to his lover, Mike. "Never stuck around long enough for a one night stand." Turns out the exact same is true for Mike, so they settle down for 55 years. Why play the field when everyone else is a cowboy anyway?
Don't suppose that only outsiders tease—the wink is the essence of the genre. Chris Ledoux, a former bareback champion who's Garth Brooks's favorite singing cowboy, has "This Cowboy's Hat," rereleased this year on 20 Greatest Hits. An old cowboy gets hassled by some bikers, who try to take his hat. As the music goes beyond "Ghost Riders in the Sky" hokey, the cowboy explains that his nephew skinned the hatband off a snake before he died in Vietnam, one of many corpses the hat represents. Humbled, the bikers shuffle off. Then the cowboy flashes "a big ole Texas grin." Then you grin.
Then you think, well, actually, there are some corpses there. And you put the Sally Timms record back on. Let it all stir together. Damn. Whole lotta cowboys going on.
From: Austin American Statesman, Dec 2nd 1999:
"Twilight Laments" begins like a crackly AM broadcast, then smoothly segues into "Dreaming Cowboy," a sweet dance of fiddle, pedal steel and bass that sets the tone for the remainder of the album. Sally Timms' (of seminal '80s punk band the Mekons) lullingly gentle and unaffected voice perfectly suits the broken-hearted country ballads heard throughout this album, her first solo outing in the twang department. She has a dreamy voice that waltzes with each tune, lazily drifting from note to note.
From the mournful "The Sad Milkman" to the plaintive "In Bristol Town One Bright Day," "Twilight's" small-town tales are beautifully executed narratives. Outside of Timms' Spanish-flavored "Cancion Para Mi Padre" and the jangly "Snowbird," this album moves with a meandering pace that's pleasantly soothing. With "Twilight," Timms proves her worth as a genuine country chanteuse.
-- anna giuliani
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/issues/current/rotations.html
SALLY TIMMS
Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos (Bloodshot)
By René Spencer Saller
Sally Timms
We crit-geeks trot out the phrase "fin de siècle" almost obsessively these days, and tiresome as it's become, sometimes this conceptual chestnut is necessary. Forgive us, O Reader, our hackishness, and permit us our reverie at the close of this exhausted century: Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos is the perfect soundtrack for the waning millennium, a sad, dreamy opiate of a record guaranteed to leave you swooning in a Swinburnian ecstasy. What is it about Sally Timms -- Mekons singer, cable-TV celebrity, Spice Girls champion and general post-punk princess -- that makes her the ideal muse for the twilight of the 20th century?
First of all, she's cooler than you, her groveling, slavering audience, and she doesn't let you forget it. Live, she's sexy and sarcastic, a regal drunk, charming but faintly scary. You feel like an unlovely bumpkin as she languidly informs you that the Arch is actually the "Gateway to the South." You start to think maybe she's right. Then she mocks you because she thinks you haven't heard of the Handsome Family. Even if you have, you still feel dumb. Maybe she's mean, but you don't care; you love her anyway because she sings so beautifully, so carelessly; she waves her arms over her head in extravagantly goofy choreographed gestures, like some demented Supreme. Her voice is one big gorgeous fuck-you, and it thrills as it chastens.
Her vocal powers reside in her personality, not in fancy technique or cornpone authenticity. She doesn't have the startling coloratura of a Dolly Parton or the majestic resonance of a Patsy Cline. She hits the notes, all right, but they fall comfortably within her middle range. She calls herself a cowboy but never tries to disguise her broad Yorkshire accent. And, despite or because of these apparent handicaps, she's made a perversely brilliant country & western album. It's not just that Timms picks the best songs to sing, from the best songwriters around: The Handsome Family, fellow Mekon Jon Langford, the sometimes-ridiculous, sometimes-sublime Robbie Fulks and the ubiquitous Jeff Tweedy all wrote new material specifically for this CD. (Her claim that she frightened them into participation is convincing.) She chooses intelligently, sure, but it's something else entirely, something beyond brains and good taste, that matters when she performs these songs. Even those that weren't written for her (Johnny Cash's "Cry, Cry, Cry," for example) sound as if they had no reason to exist before passing through her silver throat.
In fact, every track is so consistently wonderful, so perfectly of a piece, that it's hard to pick favorites. In "Dreaming Cowboy," she's tender and ardent, as Andrew Bird's sly violin and Jon Rauhouse's pedal-steel and Hawaiian guitars paint a lurid Old West landscape on black velvet. "The Sad Milkman," a heartbreaking waltz courtesy of the Handsome Family, is another gem, graced by Rennie Sparks' characteristically strange and beautiful lyrics: "But the moon she rises, and the moon she falls/And her slow white eye sees nothing at all." Fulks' "In Bristol Town One Bright Day" has the moody grandeur of an ancient English ballad, and Timms confers on it a crystalline eloquence. "Sweetheart Waltz," by Timms and Langford, sets Timms' ethereal harmonies against the simple rhythms of Rauhouse's mandolin; as she repeats the poignant two-word chorus, "I believe," with such hopeless longing, you believe, too -- even if she lies, acts like she doesn't believe in anything, even if she laughs at you later, you believe.
F E E D B A C K
By Lee Gardner
Freakwater and Sally Timms
Freakwater and Sally Timms, Fletcher's, Sept. 29
It wasn't your ordinary country-music show. There was only one cowboy hat in the room. There were no headset mics or flashpots onstage. Then there were the two skinny young boys who spent most of the night swaying together, pawing each other, and smooching sloppily in front of the stage. I've never been to a country show where some of the audience could have been on E. But Freakwater and Sally Timms aren't your ordinary country acts.
Mekons chanteuse Timms opened with an informal set featuring a pair of acoustic pickers and a songbook borrowed from Johnny Cash (a flattened-out, waltz-time version of "Cry, Cry, Cry"), Chicago roots duo the Handsome Family, and Willie Nelson. Though her clipped tone (and a Hawkwind joke) gave away her British roots, Timms has a lovely, cool alto and a wry affection for C&W—she seems to appreciate it as a poetic sort of music rather than a lifestyle choice. She's not likely to end up at the Grand Ol' Opry, but she was grand.
When Freakwater took the stage, the cowboy-hat count doubled. While sweet-faced singer/songwriter/guitarist Catherine Irwin and the rest of the band wore their usual jeans, Irwin's cool-drink-of-water singer/songwriter/guitarist partner Janet Beveridge Bean sported a salmon-colored polyester pantsuit and a light gray Stetson-style lid. ("She looks like a Judd," my companion cracked.) Another guest Mekon, Steve Goulding, sat down behind a drum kit (a Freakwater first), and longtime sideman Dave Gay plugged in an electric bass in place of his usual doghouse variety. As Irwin bawled out "I've been good/ and I've been good for nothin'" and an honest-to-God band dropped into "Good for Nothing" from the new End Time (Thrill Jockey), it became clear that Freakwater rode into Baltimore on a horse of a different color.
Freakwater's early albums and tours relied on an intimate, acoustic presentation—the better to show off Irwin and Bean's literate, clear-eyed songwriting and gorgeous harmony singing. But this version of the band is much more Flying Burrito Brothers than Carter Family, which—while still miles from contemporary Nashville standard operating procedure—doesn't necessarily improve matters. Goulding and Gay added punchy dynamics to Irwin's wry ode to her pooch, "Dog Gone Wrong," and some serious honky-tonk stomp to new single "Hellbound." But like as not, Irwin and Bean tripped over the extra musicians, or vice versa, and the fuller sound stood in the way of the lyrics, which, more so than with any other rootsy act around, demand a clear hearing. (The new album suffers in a similar fashion: great songs, but you have to dig.) Still, Freakwater scored hits with tunes new (the codependency ballad "All Life Long") and old (the wonderful cigarette reverie "Smoking Daddy"), and Irwin and Bean's rich harmonies remain one of life's underrated pure musical pleasures. The skinny boys danced all the way to the end.
| Comments from CM: First off, I don't agree that her solo outings are disposable. To The Land Of Milk and Honey is one of my all time favorites. As far as this new one, I think it's perfect for winding down after a hard day, or relaxing at midnight. Although, I do agree with fellow list members that the mix could have brought out the depth of her voice a bit more. I think the Twilight Laments album is a slow-grower; I like it better all the time. (Though I still prefer the original "Cry Cry Cry") Sally is definitely into this new singing style; she pretty much sticks to it on the new Mekons album, but it works perfectly with the overall subdued, nocturnal feel. (It's definitely a "late-night" album, which means the title fits, but not having ever read Celine I don't know what ironic meaning quoting his work signifies, so I can't join that debate.) I was rather puzzled by Pulse's negative review. Whether it's good or not, why spend the time and effort lambasting a commercial non-entity like a solo-Mekon? It's not like the critic was tilting at some windmill, he was assaulting, at best, a cult-fave and would save few from Sally's corrupting influence. On top of that, he seemed rather pro-Mekon. I hope when I was a youthful music crit, I was more consistent. |
As an essential member of the great Mekons, Sally Timms regularly stirred up a righteously ragged raucousness, seething lyrics with boozy contempt and beautiful passion. Then in the 80's, she began stepping away from the band on occasion to create interesting, if disposable, solo albums that used country music as a reference point.
Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments is not so much a step away as a poorly planned stumble. Building most songs around a tuneless take on Western music, Timms apparently tries to capture a dreamy, distant coolness with her performances. Instead, her voice has all the emotional weight of a computer-generated voice message. Moreover, the songs are so clumsy and artless that it's hard to tell whether she's being sardonic or sincere.
To hear what the album lacks, compare Timms' inert version of Johnny Cash's "Cry Cry Cry" with the fiery emotionalism of the rendition she did a decade ago for a Cash tribute album, 'Til Things Are Brighter. The older version is full of indignation, while the new barely musters resignation.
As the title suggests, maybe Timms wanted to create something for midnight listening. Instead, she's come up with something that sounds listless at any time of the day.
* (one star)
-Michael McCall
Here's an article from Nashville Scene. Thanks to Bill.
(Issue Date: January 20, 2000)
Urban Cowgirl
Timms' 'art-country' stays true to spirit of the musicSally Timms
Jan. 21 at Backwoods Studios
Jan. 25 at Billy Block's Western Beat Roots Revival
By Bill Friskics-Warren
British chanteuse Sally Timms used to treat country music as a joke--literally. In the early '80s, before she joined UK art-punk collective the Mekons, she sang with a band of women called the Shee-hees who did Billie Jo Spears covers and wrote campy country parodies. "I used to sing in a fake American accent," Timms recalls. "We used to write very sick lyrics about our husbands being in jail and about how we hoped they wouldn't fall in love with other men while they were in there. It was pretty cheeky."
Timms got serious about country music in a hurry, though. During the mid-'80s, she started singing with the Mekons, who were then entering their honky-tonk phase. She also recorded with British pub-rocker Brendan Croker, who suggested that they work up some country covers. The first flowering of that collaboration included haunting versions of the Lefty Frizzell hit "The Long Black Veil" and Dolly Parton's "Down from Dover," both of which originally appeared on Timms' 1986 EP, The Butcher's Boy Extended Player. These mournful mountain-derived ballads not only suited Timms' languorous alto, they struck an emotional chord inside her as well. "The natural choice for me is always sad material, and country is a deep vein in that respect," she explains.
Timms went on to cut a number of country tunes, the best being her torchy remake of Johnny Cash's "Cry Cry Cry" and her stolid reading of John Anderson's "Wild and Blue," recorded with the Mekons. Yet despite her affinity with hillbilly music, Timms didn't release her first country album until last November, when Bloodshot Records put out Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos.
Twilight Laments boasts songs and guest spots from Robbie Fulks, Jeff Tweedy, and coproducer (and fellow Mekon) Jon Langford, along with other members of the alt-country scene in Chicago, Timms' adopted home. But what's most striking about Timms' LP is just how utterly she embraces country music's hard-core verities. In the process, she also takes Music Row's ethic of disposability to task. "Now a barstool is all that he can ride/So he's a dreaming cowboy," she sings at one point, mourning the death of both cowboy life and country music. Here, just as the Mekons did circa Fear and Whiskey, Timms functions as a musical De Tocqueville, an outsider who in effect says, "You're neglecting something that's a crucial part of your culture."
This isn't to say that Timms' take on twang is entirely a straight one. In fact, as her stage name "Cowboy Sally" attests, her approach to hillbilly music--what she dubs art-country--is at times rather oblique. "I'm always doing gender-bending stuff," she says. For instance, she tends not to change the lyrics of songs written from a man's perspective. More acutely, though, Timms' wry cowboy moniker connects the dots between British punk's war on conventional femininity and the protofeminist subtext of Patsy Montana's 1935 million-seller "I Wanna Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart." By adopting a saddletramp persona, Timms taps the deeper meaning of Montana's single--a song about being free to live a life that was at that time denied to most women.
The very notion of adopting a persona may seem foreign to those of us who expect our musical heroes to bare their souls. Yet Timms' approach is little different from that of country interpreters who predated the singer-songwriter boom of the '60s and '70s--those singers who came to prominence before audiences began judging artists on the basis of whether they wrote their own material. And in some ways, Timms' tack is also akin to that of today's mainstream country acts, who rarely write their own stuff, but who, as Trisha Yearwood once put it, look for songs that function as "little movies, little stories that you tell from a particular character's perspective." Timms may go for more hillbilly- or Western-identified material, but her goal is the same: To connect with her audience by singing songs that speak to modern life.
Witness Timms' soft spot for the oeuvre of the Handsome Family, a Chicago duo with a twisted but inspired take on country's three chords and the truth. "Sometimes I burn my arms with cigarettes just to pretend I won't scream when I die," she deadpans on her funereal cover of the Handsomes' "Drunk by Noon."
"Extremely sick lyrics, in a way," Timms observes. "But who hasn't had those thoughts? [The Handsome Family's] lyrics say things that women think constantly. Sure, they come at country from an odd angle, but in some ways I think a far more purist angle than lots of people do now. They're definitely repackaging [the tradition] in a way that makes sense to some kind of contemporary notion."
The authority with which Timms renders doleful latter-day ballads like the Handsome Family's "Drunk by Noon" and Dolly's "Down from Dover" forges yet another crucial link to country's past: The characteristically British reserve in her crystalline delivery reveals her intuitive grasp of the stoic resolve at the heart of Appalachia's tragic songs of life. More importantly, it reminds us that the Anglo-Celtic wellspring of that tradition is Timms' to begin with.
"To some people, it's bizarre that I'm British and I sing country," she observes. "But let's face it, who really comes from a true country background anymore? I think I come at it from the fact that it was rooted in Scottish and English folk music. It's not anything conscious on my part. It's just that, somewhere in there, this is my culture"
From: Bloomington Independent
Jan 27-Feb 3, 2000
Saddle up
Cowboy Sally rides into town
By Jim Manion
Sally Timms has long been a distinctive voice in the legendary Mekons, the British band who are the Energizer Bunnies of UK art-punk (continually recording and performing in various permutations since the late '70s). She is equally distinctive in her folk/country music persona of "Cowboy Sally." Timms' new Bloodshot Records album Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments...For Lost Buckaroos is a subtly stunning study in contrast Ð Timms' soaring expressive voice full of proper British accent fronting arrangements of subdued acoustic American twang, singing deceptively pretty songs with hints of troubling darkness.
Timms makes her first appearance in Bloomington tonight at the Cellar Lounge at 8 p.m. Cover is $5. Her bandmate Chris Mills and local porch-sitting singer/songwriter Tom Roznowski will open the show with solo sets. Timms and her band will also perform live on WFHB (91.3/98.1 FM) at 4 p.m.
Sultry and gleaming in her role as Mekons singer, Timms' solo work as "Cowboy Sally" has always seemed a lighthearted break from her more serious Mekons attack. But with Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments... she settles into her side-project departure with ripe confidence, like she's ready to sit down by the fire and stay awhile. A hand-picked cast of alt-country players and stray Mekons (including Jessica Billy from Moonshine Willy on violin; Tom Ray of The Bottle Rockets on bass; John Rauhouse from Grevious Angels on a variety of string instruments; Tortoise drummer John Herndon; and Mekon/Waco Brother Jon Langford) help make the album shimmer. A tasty roundup of songwriters (Brett and Rennie Sparks, Robbie Fulks, Jon Langford, Jeff Tweedy, Jill Sobule) help create a song cycle of earthy grace, giving Timms' stirring voice a chance to drift in dreamy, dusty splendor.
Timms penned three songs with Langford for the album, "Sweetheart Waltz," "Cancion Para Mi Padre" and "Dark Sun," a slyly sweet tune with nuclear holocaust imagery straight out of Dr. Strangelove: "when the first one falls we'll be crawling up the walls/down in the valley of our souls".
Two trail-tested country and western chestnuts surface on the album as well, Guy Lawrence's lonesome cowboy ballad "Dreaming Cowboy" and Johnny Cash's "Cry, Cry, Cry".
Whether projecting wild charisma and riveting sultry vocals in the Mekons visceral maelstrom or subtly charming a quiet traditional song with an acoustic band in "Cowboy Sally" mode, Timms' crisp Julie Andrews-in-a-parallel-universe vocals point to something that is mostly forgotten, except to musical archaeologists: American country music draws heavily on British folk music for some of it's key lyrical and musical ingredients. And come to think of it, the primal sway of British folk was and is always somewhere in the Mekons mix. Even in their most pile-driving songs, the musical feel of Mekons music always stands apart from the more staccato riffs of their Brit-punk peers.
Currently on a chilly winter tour across America in support of her new release, Timms caught up with me last week on the way to a gig in Memphis. She called from the pay phone at the kitschy Lambert's Cafe in Sikeston, Mo. Ð "The Home of Throwed Rolls." Here waiters rove the restaurant pushing carts loaded with hot over-yeasted rolls Ð and then throw the white bread at diners.
It was a perfectly ironic location for her to talk about her connection to American roots music, specifically country music. "It's more by default," she explains, her crisp British accent cutting through the phone line, "other people have brought things to my attention. I wouldn't say it's a huge interest of mine in the sense of being particularly knowledgeable about it. In the Mekons we did quite a few different versions of country music, and I was doing folk music things on my own and it kind of fell in with that." A good taste of The Mekons' first forays into country sounds can be found on their mid-'80s releases Honky Tonkin' and Fear and Whiskey. Although she modestly admits she's no sleuthy country musicologist, Timms' scintillating voice is a natural fit to the music, and the campfire band aura of her new recording's sonics surrounds her voice with guitars, fiddles and dreamy steel guitar like a warm blanket. If it were not for an offer from Bloodshot, a true grit insurgent country label based in Chicago, Timms doubts a full-fledged country album would have surfaced from her.
"The advantage of doing it with Bloodshot is that I don't think I would have done a record that was just country, but I very much felt like since it was for a country label it gave me an excuse to make a totally country record. It came out wonderfully and it flows quite nicely as a fully formed piece. I think that's partly because we recorded most of the backing tracks in one day. Everyone played pretty much live, there wasn't a lot of overdubbing. It has a live band feel and a consistent sound, even though the songs are all quite different."
Timms is touring with as a trio that features multi-instrumentalist John Rauhouse, who will be switching off between banjo, mandolin and Hawaiian steel guitar. Also along for the ride is Chris Mills on guitar, a fine recording artist in his own right who's most recent album Every Night Fight For Your Life was released on Sugar Free Records in 1998.
About what to expect from their performance, Timms said, "Musically it's quite tight - low key, but very full and pretty. That was my aim. I wanted to do more live playing without drums because it gives me a lot more leeway with my voice."
As one of her bandmates comes to the phone to tell her the food is on the table, Sally Timms closes our phone chat with a taste of her hilariously disarming Brit-wit, "So musically it's very pretty and well-honed, but the gaps between the songs are just offensive and obscene. It should be a fun night." While I doubt the Cellar will be serving campfire beans and cowboy coffee while we sit on hay bales, Thursday night's show is sure to feel like a starry night on the open trail. Don't miss it, buckaroos. Jim Manion can be reached at ionman@bluemarble.net .
from Folk Roots Nos. 199-200 (Vol. 21 Nos. 7-8) January-February 2000, p. 12.
Root Salad: A Cowgirly Thing
Chris Nickson talks to art-country queen Sally Timms.
Supposedly, even cowgirls get the blues, if you can believe what some
authors tell you. Drifting cowgirls, though, make some fine, fine
music. Sally Timms, long-time member of the Mekons (hear her fronting
Ghosts Of American Astronauts on Nascente's Roots compilation),
leader of the late Drifting Cowgirls, and solo artist extraordinaire, does
make remarkable sounds, as you can hear on her new album, Cowboy Sally's
Twilight Laments For Lost Buckaroos (sample a track on this issue's
fRoots #14 CD). As the title implies, it's night music, often
becoming almost ambient country, and a definite continuation of the ideas
she's pursued on her previous releases.
"There's definitely a thread here," she agrees. When I listen to my stuff, I always think, 'It sounds so languid.' I don't sing fast songs -- everything's very drawn-out. It's poignant and sad, and also a little arch and campy. Art-country, that's my definition. I'm quite pleased with that. It wasn't anywhere near as extreme as I was aiming for, but I don't want to go too crazy on this. It's almost a side project for some other things I have going on, but it developed in such a nice way that it became a little more than that."
These days Timms lives in Chicago, which has become one of the centres of the alt.country movement (such as it is), and a fertile place for musicians of all kinds.
"It's nice to be able to call on other people. That's the nice thing about living here. There are a lot of really good musicians who live here. Everyone assumes those people are too cool... and they're not. I wanted something smooth-sound, even though it's a little uneasy. A lot of the way things turn out is always chance."
One of the album's highlights (apart from the inclusion of steel drums on a couple of dreamy country songs) is In Bristol Town One Bright Day, the kind of song to get you reaching for the sleeve to make sure it's ont some lost trad. ballad. In fact, it's composed by Robbie Fulks.
"Robbie is definitely very good at appropriating stuff and making it his own," Timms agrees. "He wrote it, but it's obviously very much in the vein of a traditional song. He's a very good songwriter. That's another advantage of being here. It's just very easy to call on people. They say yes because they're kind of into it, possibly because people don't often ask them. That's the way I always worked on records -- I know all these people who can do stuff really well, and I ask them, and very rarely do they say no."
She'll be touring with the album, but eschewing the traditional band format -- a case of been there, done that. "It's me, Chris Mills on acoustic guitar, and John Rauhouse, who plays a lot of the instrumentation on the record, on Hawaiian steel, banjo, and mandolin. Very sparse. I like the idea of being the loudest person on stage."
In case you imagine this solo activity means the Mekons are on hold, think again. They've had a busy year, putting out two collections of rare and unreleased material, and "We're recording a new record right now. We're working through something, and we've decided it has to be good, not a knockoff. There's a strange and long history there, and I think we've made some good songs. The Mekons are essentially a folk band, anyway. We do very little in England these days. I am sure there are places we could play, but it's a case of finding them. I've talked to our agent, wondering why we don't do more folk stuff."
So Sally Timms remains a busy woman, particularly when you include the other big project she's working on.
"I've been working live for a long time with a primitive sequencer, and I've been working on a sort of very primitive electro-folk record. As a reference point, I used The Marble Index, by Nico; that's my template. It won't sound like that, but it's a starting point. I'm looking to make something more avant-garde. I think all the women musicians I like tend to be more in the avant-garde -- Yoko Ono, the more extreme stuff Bjork does, P.J. Harvey -- I see her as a folk musician in a way. She straddles folk and rock. But if I could make a record like Johnny Dowd I'd be a very happy woman."
But why should people fall neatly into pigeonholes? Sally Timms
has been evading them for years. And that's the best way to be, obviously,
allowing you to go where you will, sing like a glorious nightingale, and
make some fabulous records. So let her twilight laments lull you
to sleep...
from From Minneapolis City Pages(http://citypages.com/databank/20/989/article8205.asp)
Mike Ness
Under the Influences
Time Bomb Recordings
SALLY TIMMS AND Mike Ness share middle age and the distinction of singing with thoughtful, long-lived punk bands--she with the Mekons, he with Social Distortion. Each also has a new solo album foraying more directly into the country music that inspired both groups, though only Timms treats the tradition as more than a chance to look cute in chaps.
Under the Influences is the second set of country covers from Ness this year, following Cheating at Solitaire, and it's just as infatuated with the bad-boy country mythos hatched by Hank Williams and embodied by Johnny Cash. With his scouring-pad vocals and real-life rap sheet, Ness is made for the part, but it's still only acting. He sticks to obvious drinkin'-cheatin'-killin' standards such as Marty Robbins's "Big Iron," Marvin Rainwater's "Gamblin' Man," and the Hank Sr. classics "House of Gold" and "Six More Miles." It all feels straight out of a Cash fakebook, right down to that heavy boom-chicka beat, except that Ness replaces the Tennessee Two with what sounds like a Hell's Angel on guitar and an angry gorilla on bass.
Cowboy Sally contains Timms's own Cash tribute: a cover of the Man in Black's first single for Sun Records, "Cry Cry Cry." Rendered in a simple but luxuriously clear voice, her take on the original MIB myth cuts Ness's testosterone level by about 100 percent. But don't call Timms timid: Her country touchstone is "The Pill," not "Stand By Your Man." For all of Ness's muscle and fury, Timms's record takes more risks and yields more rewards. "Cry Cry Cry" is one of only two oldies she tackles; three are originals co-written with Mekons mate Jon Langford, and a handful of songs are penned by her Chicago scene peers. Whether running barefoot through the bluegrass of Robbie Fulks's "In Bristol Town One Bright Day" or mourning the Handsome Family's macabre "Sad Milkman," the chanteuse twists the detritus of roots tradition into something intriguing and new. Timms, unlike Ness, knows that country is no museum piece.
from From http://www.countrystandardtime.com/sallytimmsFEATURE.html
Timms tells of her laments
By Brian Steinberg
Sally Timms has been up all night. "I'm still on that alcohol high," she says over the phone. You know the place - that balancing point between a pleasant buzz and a crushing hangover. The lesson here, perhaps, is that one shouldn't go to see Blue Rodeo at a local Chicago area hangout when one has a concert of her own coming up the very next night.
Ah, well. Sally Timms is not known for sticking to the straight path.
Take her new album, "Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments For Lost Buckaroos." It's downright, well, pretty. And that's just the effect this current member of The Mekons, the English pub rats known for their loose-limbed brawling sound, wanted.
"I just wanted to make a record that was very pretty," she says. "I wanted it to be light and playful."
That it is. Timms' folksy effort includes a Robbie Fulks tune, "In Bristol Town One Bright Day," that wouldn't sound out of place around a campfire, or on an English street corner as night begins to fall.
The light, airy antics start off with "Dreaming Cowboy," run into the ethereal "Sweetheart Waltz," include a slowed-down version of Johnny Cash's "Cry Cry Cry" and a piece with lyrics written by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy ("It was pretty easy. He just gave me the track. I haven't ever sat down and played with him," she says. "It's a moot point. People seem to think he played on this record, but I can't say if he did or not. I like the idea of the mystery.")
The record is sweet and atmospheric, boozy and lurchy - the perfect sound for that time of night when you're back from the bars and want to crash in a heap of pillows and blankets.
"My initial intent was just to do something that was kind of unashamedly pretty, and I'm kind of pleased with the way it came out," she says. "It's like a light theatrical piece, but to other people it's probably quite different."
"It's an acoustic record, but we didn't use a lot of standard country instrumentation. We used steel drums and odd percussions."
Timms also says this new record represents a new achievement: she did most of the work herself.
"I think it's more rounded,' she says. "A lot of my earlier stuff was very reliant on the hard work of other people...because I'm extremely lazy."
Fellow Mekon and current Waco Brother Jon Langford has always been a help, she says, and in fact, two songs on "Cowboy Sally" are written by Timms and Langford.
Still, she says, "this is more my work. I chose the songs. I basically chose the kind of instrumentation and guided people with how I wanted it to sound. A lot of it is my ideas. I was just very lucky to work with people who are very good. Even the artwork came together very nicely in a way I didn't expect."
Some may be surprised by the lightness of "Cowboy Sally's " songs. After all, the album is sparse on the percussion. "There's a drunken feel to it. It swings around, and it's loose," Timms says of the collection. "That was the idea - not to use drums, except for a couple of tracks."
In fact, part of the decision might be to keep live performances to a dull roar. "Everything has to go up so many notches in volume" when one uses drums live, she says. "I just felt it wasn't very necessary. It's got a much more fluid feel, and overly country records don't have much drums, but I made that connection later on."
Economics might also have played a role. Timms says she was working with a budget of about $4,000. "We have to be pretty fast," she says, but that's a dynamic she's used to dealing with. With many Mekons discs, after all, "we work extremely fast, leaving in the anomalies. Those things may not be perfect, but they make it interesting."
The same might be said of her musical career. Timms was born in Leeds, England, where she sang in the church choir. At 20, she met up with a bunch of arty punk bands taking root in the area, including The Mekons and Gang of Four. In 1980, she made her first album, an avant-garde score for a non-existent film called "Hangahar."
She continued to make music throughout the early '80's, releasing two EP's and her second album, "Somebody's Rocking My Dreamboat." She also began singing occasionally with The Mekons, a band that has been persevering in the punk and roots-rock words since 1979. Timms has also continued to make solo recordings. Her last, "To The Land Of Milk And Honey," was released in 1994.
Despite the lullabies and sweetness filling her latest effort, Timms isn't about to drift off anywhere. The Mekons have recorded a new album, she says, which should be out in March. And besides, "you only get out of The Mekons in a box. It just keeps going. It really has a life of its own."
Timms had been out touring with the Freakwater in order to support her latest work, but she believes she will have to go out again. West Coast and midwestern dates are inevitable, she says, but "I'm reliant on the kindness of strangers, so I'll have to see if any more successful bands will take me out with them."
If they do, get ready for a woozy take on tradition that may well leave you lightheaded and feeling free.
from From: http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2000/02/08/191689.html
Vakker og stemningsfull plate som lukter hest lang vei.
Av ØYVIND RØNNING
Tirsdag 8. februar 2000 15:24
Cowboy-nostalgien ligger tykt utenpå Sally Timms. Hvem kunne trodd at denne dama er født i Leeds og var inspirert av glamrock og punk før hun konverterte til countrymusikken? Først og fremst skaper hun en var og unik stemning der hun varsomt nærmest hvisker fram ordene, ledsaget av et forsiktig komp av tradisjonelle instrumenter som gitar, fiolin, mandolin og steel-gitar og mer overraskende innslag som oljefat og bjeller. Tre av låtene på den altfor korte plata (36 minutter) har hun skrevet sammen med medprodusent Jon Langford, som hun også jobbet med i bandet Mekons. Hun gjør også fine versjoner av blant andre Robbie Fulks' «In Bristol Town One Bright Day», Johnny Cash-låta «Cry Cry Cry» og innledende «Dreaming Cowboy» (Guy Lawrence) - som virkelig slår an tonen for en vakker og tilbakelent plate så fjernt fra masseprodusert countrymusikk som du vel kan komme.
From http://www.drawerb.com/00/1/947263161.htm
Review by Robert H.
When an artist falling under the struggling rubric “alt.country” is good, it is usually because of a return to whiskey-glass songwriting and a rawness of presentation that escapes the Nashville production halo. Sally Timms tries another route: a combination of light irony with an innocently eager voice. The songs, for the most part, are by others, the production is glossy and the instrumentals are studio. So what’s the angle? The irony drops out, I think, as irrelevant and annoying halfway through the first listen (and perhaps after the third time one reads the title), forcing Sally to work without a net: no meager task, since she now surely stands in a comparison class of Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and other greats. What has Sally got to add? Not much.
First of all, since she is obviously not shedding blood in these songs or showing us her guts (see Lucinda), her voice had better be spectacular (see Emmylou). It is, unfortunately, merely conventionally pretty. Against the background of what sounds like conventional studio-musician arrangements, this gets pretty thin. Even as a song-showcase the album isn’t really a success. The first three songs, “Dreaming Cowboy”, “The Sad Milkman”, and “Dark Sun" rely quite a bit on the losing cute card. The album moves on and begins to assume responsibility for itself with “In Bristol Town One Bright Day”, but the result is fairly traditional and repetitive. The Johnny Cash cover “Cry Cry Cry” reminds one that only under unusual circumstances should one cover the song of a master, and “Snowbird” gets cute again by imitating the old Opry sound without doing anything new. Interestingly, the songs that succeed are mostly the ones Timms herself had a hand in writing. “Sweetheart Waltz” actually sounds fresh, sweet and heartfelt, and “Cancion Para Mi Padre” provides the album’s one unequivocal keeper despite the fact that it best shows the weakness of Timms’ voice. Also beating par is Jeff Tweedy’s arrangement of “When the Roses Bloom Again” and the simple “Rock Me to Sleep”, but the success lies with the songs and not with the presentation of them.
Sally Timms has a nice voice and might have some talent for songwriting, but the album doesn’t fly. Country works best when it is painful not when it is ironic, and to be painful the blood must flow. Otherwise, why leave Nashville in the first place?
from http://www.insurgentcountry.com/sally_timms.htm
I had the craziest dream last night. You know the kind I mean? When your head and the bed are spinning (it ain't passing out if you hit the mattress) and you conk out with all the lights on and all your clothes on, and the radio is buzzing and parking--stuck between two stations? You can't tell if you're awake or asleep--everything's so vivid and nearly tactile- but weird, weird, weirrrd.
When it started off, I was wandering and lost in the Painted Desert, dressed only in a pair of Lone Ranger pajamas. It was a cold and clear midnight, under a million crystal stars. But, suddenly, the stars all turned into tiny teardrops -- and I heard a beautiful, honeyed voice singing from far away -- but getting louder and louder. Suddenly I saw SALLY TIMMS (you know, that highbrow canary with the lowbrow vocabulary from that UK art-punk band, THE MEKONS?) floating down out of the sky like some kind of wild west Mary Poppins. She was twirling a blue velvet lariat -- in which she had lassoed a surreal cowboy band. She was drifting down with her players in tow, like they were a bizarre bunch of balloons. I tell you, I never heard anything as pretty and sad as the music they were making as they touched down.
There was TOM RAY (x-THE BOTTLE ROCKETS) with layers of Band-Aids on his fingers, playing bass on a stringed cactus -- and JOHN HERNDON (from TORTOISE) was drumming away on a snaggle-toothed longhorn skull -- JOHN RICE (from THE PINE VALLEY COSMONAUTS) was playing a little bit of everything (but he was wearing a Chanel sheath dress, and insisting over and over in a loud effeminate voice that his name was "Celine"...) -- JESSICA BILLEY (from MOONSHINE WILLY) was sawing a fiddle bow across a hank of her own hair, pulled tight from scalp to fist -- and JON RAU HOUSE (from GRIEVOUS ANGELS) just kept blithely sliding a roll of quarters back and forth across the top of a barbed-wire fence, making the steel strings moan in the moonlight.
And Cowboy Sally just kept sighing and singing those cowboy songs. She sang tunes I never heard before -- songs by JEFF TWEEDY, ROBBIE FULKS, THE HANDSOME FAMILY, and JILL SOBULE. She sand songs that you could just tell she had written herself -- including a Spanish canciope that would make you cry in your cerveza. Then she even sang a JOHNNY CASH ballad that I knew by heart. It was lonely, but it was lovely. Oh yes.
The sun was just beginning to rise and I saw my house on the horizon. Then, all of a sudden, JON LANGFORD (MEKONS, WACO BROTHERS, tomorrow the world...) galloped by on a mammoth saddled rattlesnake. He was shouting something about Dr. Strangelove and buckets of milk, but I couldn't really understand what he was saying. His mouth was crammed full of doughnuts. And then I woke up.
from http://www.newcitychicago.com/home/daily/raw/102299_sally.html
by Mitch Myers
"Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments ... For Lost Buckaroos" (Bloodshot Records) estimable vocal contributions to The Mekons, a twenty-year-old punk-turned-reggae-turned-country-turned-avant-garde-rock group. Her voice is one of the high points on classic Mekon recordings like "So Good It Hurts" and "Curse Of The Mekons." On those records (and many others) Timms' singing stands out like a single sweet rose amid a bouquet of rough and tumble gardenias. On her second full-length solo disc Timms slows things down considerably and emerges as her winsome alter ego, Cowboy Sally. Surrounded by some of Chicago's more talented musicians that play what we like to call "Insurgent Country," Timms glorious voice is put to good use. Besides a great rendition of Johnny Cash's 'Cry Cry Cry," Cowboy Sally interprets the compositions of fellow Mekon Jon Langford, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Nashville exile Robbie Fulks and the Handsome Family's depressive love couple, Brett and Rennie Sparks. A charming collection of songs with traditionalist C&W roots, "Twilight Laments" showcases the glorious melancholy of Sally Timms' backwater muse. Her dramatic reading of Guy Lawrence's 'Dreaming Cowboy" is as pure as a mountain stream and stands up there with the best of country divas like Kitty Wills or Patsy Cline. With Jessica Billey and Andrew Bird contributing authentic fiddle playing and Jon Rauhouse laying down some great steel guitar, this record has a high lonesome feel that's not always present on the latest album by Ms. Shania Twain. Trust a bawdy gal from England to play American country music good and proper. Now all we have to do is wait for the new Mekons record.
from http://www.riverfronttimes.com/issues/1999-12-15/rotations.html
By Susan Anderson
We crit-geeks trot out the phrase "fin de siècle" almost obsessively these days, and tiresome as it's become, sometimes this conceptual chestnut is necessary. Forgive us, O Reader, our hackishness, and permit us our reverie at the close of this exhausted century: Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos is the perfect soundtrack for the waning millennium, a sad, dreamy opiate of a record guaranteed to leave you swooning in a Swinburnian ecstasy. What is it about Sally Timms -- Mekons singer, cable-TV celebrity, Spice Girls champion and general post-punk princess -- that makes her the ideal muse for the twilight of the 20th century?
First of all, she's cooler than you, her groveling, slavering audience, and she doesn't let you forget it. Live, she's sexy and sarcastic, a regal drunk, charming but faintly scary. You feel like an unlovely bumpkin as she languidly informs you that the Arch is actually the "Gateway to the South." You start to think maybe she's right. Then she mocks you because she thinks you haven't heard of the Handsome Family. Even if you have, you still feel dumb. Maybe she's mean, but you don't care; you love her anyway because she sings so beautifully, so carelessly; she waves her arms over her head in extravagantly goofy choreographed gestures, like some demented Supreme. Her voice is one big gorgeous fuck-you, and it thrills as it chastens.
Her vocal powers reside in her personality, not in fancy technique or cornpone authenticity. She doesn't have the startling coloratura of a Dolly Parton or the majestic resonance of a Patsy Cline. She hits the notes, all right, but they fall comfortably within her middle range. She calls herself a cowboy but never tries to disguise her broad Yorkshire accent. And, despite or because of these apparent handicaps, she's made a perversely brilliant country & western album. It's not just that Timms picks the best songs to sing, from the best songwriters around: The Handsome Family, fellow Mekon Jon Langford, the sometimes-ridiculous, sometimes-sublime Robbie Fulks and the ubiquitous Jeff Tweedy all wrote new material specifically for this CD. (Her claim that she frightened them into participation is convincing.) She chooses intelligently, sure, but it's something else entirely, something beyond brains and good taste, that matters when she performs these songs. Even those that weren't written for her (Johnny Cash's "Cry, Cry, Cry," for example) sound as if they had no reason to exist before passing through her silver throat.
In fact, every track is so consistently wonderful, so perfectly of a piece, that it's hard to pick favorites. In "Dreaming Cowboy," she's tender and ardent, as Andrew Bird's sly violin and Jon Rauhouse's pedal-steel and Hawaiian guitars paint a lurid Old West landscape on black velvet. "The Sad Milkman," a heartbreaking waltz courtesy of the Handsome Family, is another gem, graced by Rennie Sparks' characteristically strange and beautiful lyrics: "But the moon she rises, and the moon she falls/And her slow white eye sees nothing at all." Fulks' "In Bristol Town One Bright Day" has the moody grandeur of an ancient English ballad, and Timms confers on it a crystalline eloquence. "Sweetheart Waltz," by Timms and Langford, sets Timms' ethereal harmonies against the simple rhythms of Rauhouse's mandolin; as she repeats the poignant two-word chorus, "I believe," with such hopeless longing, you believe, too -- even if she lies, acts like she doesn't believe in anything, even if she laughs at you later, you believe.
from By Greil Marcus Nov. 1, 1999
Ever since she strolled coolly, coldly through "Millionaire" on "I HEART Mekons," Timms has been the last country singer you'd want to go up against in a staring contest. Her touch is light, and deceptive; her reserves of depth seem bottomless. But nothing she's done before suggests the exquisite balance of this disc, the way she makes both Robbie Fulks' "In Bristol Town One Bright Day" (which could be an ancient English ballad known through a 1928 recording by Buell Kazee of Kentucky) and Johnny Cash's ditty "Cry Cry Cry" (the flip side of his first single, cut for Sun Records of Memphis in 1956) seem like old family stories: tales Timms might not have quite believed when she first heard them as a girl, but which, to her surprise, as a grown woman, she found she had herself lived out.
from http://www.stereotimes.com/Music_Reviews/Timms.htm
For Sally Timms, being the estrogen influence in the Mekons has to be a lot like being the babe target for the circus knifethrower. It's ultimately safe but the possibility for great danger is always as close as the other side of the stage. To balance the manic energy of the Mekons' frenetic sideshow, Timms takes the occasional break to concoct a little traditional country treat like Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments?, her second solo album.
Timms has assembled a flawless set of songs, both traditional and original, and a stacked deck of talent to produce Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments?. "Sweetheart Waltz," a Timms/Jon Langford co-write, sounds like a Brian Eno take on a country two-step, while Timms' cover of Johnny Cash's "Cry Cry Cry" is gently heartbreaking. The Handsome Family is well represented, with Timms' take on Rennie and Brett Sparks' "The Sad Milkman" and "Snowbird," which are perfect fodder for Timms' country warble. Timms' secret weapons on Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments? are the twin contributions of Grievous Angel Jon Rauhouse on damn near everything from pedal steel to banjo, and former Bottlerocket Tom Ray on upright bass. Appearances by Robbie Fulks, Andrew Bird, and Jon Langford are the icing on a damn near perfect musical cake.
If Chrissie Hynde ever let her country influences rise all the way to the top, she might come up with something possessing the power and grace of Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments?. Sally Timms has very little to prove at this point in her career, so any solo offerings come not from a void that she feels from her Mekons work, but from a pure love of this kind of earthy and gorgeous country music.
