Vocalist Margo Timmins Explains The Cowboy Junkies’ Sound

Although they’re famously free-riding, mythically rugged individualists and their music is highly addictive, the four members of the Cowboy Junkies are neither cowboys nor junkies.

They make up the hip, hybrid Canadian indie band with a rich repertoire of originals and classic covers wrapped in an aura of mystery. The Cowboy Junkies — the little, but hugely classy, cult band — returns to perform on Sunday, July 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Hartford’s Infinity Hall.

Together for three decades through the best and the worst of times, the Cowboys started out as a young, scuffling garage band in Toronto.

Absorbing everything from rock and punk to folk and blues, the Cowboys — a name picked at random — first thundered onto the international scene with their breakthrough release, “The Trinity Session,” in 1988. Just two years before, the Cowboys’ debut disc made such a tiny splash that it barely covered the touring band’s fuel expenses for its van to travel across stretches of Canadian prairies to gigs.

In this troupe comprising three siblings — drummer Peter Timmins, vocalist Margo Timmins, songwriter/guitarist Michael Timmins — and bassist Alan Anton, the most compelling element in its sonic mix is the seductively soft, elegant lead singer Margo Timmins.

Margo’s pristinely melodic, hauntingly beautiful voice is the first thing that ropes you into the Cowboys’ well-spun web generated by their free-flowing ensemble sound, which accentuates the dark and dreamy depths of their melancholic signature songs.

Edgy mini-dramas etched in metaphoric language, the songs’ sorrowful narratives deal poetically with everything from life, love and death to despair and the whole host of woes universal to the human condition.

Miraculously, out of all the band’s terrible beauty and artfully atmospheric angst lurk glimmers of light and hope.

With her smoky, evocative voice tempered with an organically cool but far from chill delivery, Margo is at the heart of the band.

Simultaneously, the band’s velvet vibe of underground mystery and unfolding hypnotic ambience is sustained by the team effort.

A longtime friend, Anton is virtually a Timmins family member, a de facto brother who, in their childhood hometown of Montreal, went to nursery school with Margo and was boyhood chums with Mike, who, even back then, was a rock and word-and-poetry-obsessed kid, a voracious reader and addicted wordsmith in-the-making.

A minimalist whose sultry voice and plain, speech-like phrasing constantly implies that less is more, Margo is the band’s crown jewel, a singer who, with seemingly little effort, could quite convincingly sing the entire text to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” and even soar celestially on either Soren Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” or his “The Sickness Unto Death.”

Luckily for Margo, her brother Mike, the band’s prolific in-house poet laureate, provides her with many intense, emotional songs.

Margo breathes life into her brother’s literate, poetic words.

The Cowboys opening set in Hartford features material from its latest release, “Notes Falling Slow,” a four-CD box set released on their own indie label, Latent Recordings.

A good introduction to Margo’s enigmatically expressive singing voice as well as to Mike’s sophisticated poetic voice laden with latent meanings, the box set focuses on re-mastered editions of “Open” (2001), “One Soul Now” (2004) and “At the End of Paths Taken” (2007). A fourth CD contains nine previously unreleased songs recorded during those sessions.

Recently, Margo Timmins took a break from her Northeast tour to talk by phone.

Q: Margo, how would you define the core elements of the band’s sound that seem to derive from everything from rock and punk to folk and blues?

A: You take all your influences and you mush them all together. So it’s hard to know which one stands out.

I think at the center of it and what people hear right away is the vocal, which is pretty and melodic. Behind that is this really weird wall of sound where there isn’t any melody, especially in the later years. Sometimes it can be sweet and quiet, and other times it can get really ugly and scary.

Q: Is there any element that has tended to get overlooked over the years?

A: Yes, at the center of it all is a really strong, repetitive and constant, very punk-like bass sound, which gets overlooked a lot when people talk about our music.

Q: Critics ransack their thesaurus when they write about your voice. How did that distinctive sound evolve?

A: I don’t know if it’s distinctive. But in the beginning when the band was young, my voice was considered just another instrument. We never thought of it even as the voice in the band. If I had to describe my voice, I would say it’s like a talking voice. I don’t put anything on it. My singing voice is like my talking voice. I just open my mouth and it comes out.

Q: You had no formal training and hadn’t sung in public, so, initially, you dreaded singing onstage, right?

A: Yes, whenever the music stopped — like whenever Mike had to tune his guitar — I realized that people were staring at me. I just didn’t know what to do with the microphone unless I was singing into it.

Q: Obviously, that dread faded away long ago.

A: Right, now you can’t shut me up onstage. I’m very comfortable there.

Q: Tell me about some of your famous concert rituals, like having flowers onstage with you like a kind of safety net.

A: In the early days when being in the center spot was scary for me, I brought flowers onstage so that I could look at them whenever there was that silence between songs, or if I was messing up in the middle of a song. Whenever that happened, I could look at the flowers instead of at the audience.

Q: Why does the band so happily embrace dark, even melancholy themes?

A: I think that before you become a musician, you’re a music fan and, like most young fans in their teens and early 20s, your life is probably complicated, filled with angst, wonderments and confusion. And as a human being, you look for ways of expressing those feelings.

I’ve always said that when you’re happy you don’t really need to express it. The darker side talks to our soul, not because we’re dark, but because we’re trying to become less dark.

Q: There is a glimmer of hope, though, right?

A: Sure. It’s all about relationships with others, relationships with our earth and relationships with our surroundings. And, of course, our songs have lots of references to weather, and I think that’s the Canadian part of us.

Q: So what’s the glimmer of hope?

A: I think the glimmer of hope is in not being afraid of looking at the darkness and the loneliness. I think by doing that you do find hope.

COWBOY JUNKIES perform Sunday, July 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Infinity Hall, 32 Front St., Hartford. Tickets for the concert are $44 to $59. Information: infinityhall.com and box office, 866-666-6306.