Cowboy Junkies Weather the Barrage : The Canadian band comes through a period of intense attention with its perspective intact, and a follow-up album

“Sad songs are the prettiest,” claims Michael Timmins, whose band the Cowboy Junkies is turning out some of the most heart-wrenching music to come along since Hank Williams parked his Cadillac for the last time.

“Maybe it’s because we live in a society where we’re supposed to be happy all the time so we try to mask ourselves from sadness. People see sadness as something negative, but for me it’s an emotion that can be very inspiring and touch people deeply if dealt with properly.”

Sadness seems to be something Cowboy Junkies know a thing or two about. With their 1988 U.S. debut, “The Trinity Session,” a home-movie of an album recorded for $250 in one 14-hour session in a Toronto church, they pared country music down to the point that there was nothing left but the teardrops. Anchored to the husky, celestial whisper of vocalist Margo Timmins and bathed in washes of traditional instruments (accordion, harmonica, pedal steel), their music filters country through a stark, minimalist lens that throws the melancholy, longing and regret of life into high relief.

Talking with the band’s central players, sister and brother Margo and Michael Timmins, on the eve of the release of their follow-up album “The Caution Horses,” one detects traces of the moody sensibility that permeates their music, but mostly they come off as remarkably well-adjusted people. Having walked to RCA Records’ Hollywood offices from their nearby hotel, they shuffle in dressed in faded T-shirts and jeans, politely request some water and orange juice, and hunker down for a day of wrangling with the press. No rock star attitude here yet.

Quiet, bookish people (Michael’s currently devouring Southern writers such as Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, while science-fiction buff Margo is in the middle of Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius”), the Timmins arrived in the limelight recently enough that they’re still flattered by the attention, and they answer the interviewer’s questions with care.

It was, after all, just two years ago that Margo was working as a secretary in her father’s Toronto law firm with no thought whatsoever of a career as a singer. Both recently married and in their late 20s (Michael took a wife two months ago, while Margo tied the knot with the band’s lawyer, Graham Henderson, last year), they seem slightly dazed by the fact that their fledgling effort in the U.S. marketplace sold 650,000 copies and finished near the top of most 1988 year-end critics’ polls (it was voted album of the year by The Times).

“This has been an incredibly intense period for us, but I’m happy with the way the group held up under the barrage of attention,” comments Michael. “I think the fact that we’re brother and sister helped us keep a handle on things. We grew up poking fun at each other and that helps keep you down to earth.” (The group also includes their brother Peter Timmins.)

While Cowboy Junkies have moved to the lead of the current pack of innovative young bands, Margo has moved to the front of Cowboy Junkies. Though Michael formed the band, writes the bulk of the material and is, as Margo says “very much the leader of the group,” it’s Margo, an ethereal beauty with porcelain skin, chiseled cheekbones and a wild mane of hair, who’s commanding the lion’s share of attention.

Recently hailed by Esquire magazine as one of “The Women We Love,” she’s shaping up to be a sex symbol to reckon with. In light of how seriously they take their music, the group is surprisingly undisturbed by this turn of events.

“It’s always been our intention that Margo be the focal point of the band so I have no problem with that,” Michael said. “She’s a very beautiful woman and there’s nothing wrong with showing that. Moreover, it’s important to me that the music be sensual and she imbues the lyrics with an ambiguity and sensuality that isn’t necessarily there on paper.”

“There’s always an element of sex in music but it doesn’t have to be expressed in a crass way,” Margo said. “Emmylou Harris sings about emotional things that bring out deep feelings in people, some of which are sexual, but she doesn’t do it in a roll-in-the-hay way.

“I don’t object to being packaged as a sex symbol as long as it remains true,” she said. “I’ve always cared about looking pretty and always put my lipstick on like mother told me, and being seen as attractive is very important to me. These things can get out of control, of course, and it’s up to me to control them. But I’ve always been rather modest and have never worn exposing clothing, so if I start dressing provocatively it probably means I’m having a nervous breakdown,” she says, laughing.

“Still, being the center of attention is as yet a bit foreign to me. I’ve never gotten a lot of attention because I grew up in a family of six kids and have two sisters who are much more beautiful than I am. So, it’s my nature to sit quietly and watch the world go by, assuming the role of the observer rather than the observed. So when I look at my life now I think, ‘God, how did you get there?!’ ”

Margo may be the face of the band, but Michael is very much its resident visionary. Profoundly affected as a teen-ager by the seminal British post-punk band Joy Division, Michael relocated to New York City in 1979 at age 19 and formed his first band, Hunger Project, with Cowboy Junkies bassist Alan Anton. Hunger Project disbanded after an unsuccessful year, and in 1981 the pair traveled to England and launched a group called Germinal, a noise band along the lines of Sonic Youth.

Three years and two albums later, Michael’s primal-scream period had run its course and he was ready for some quiet music. He returned to Toronto, began writing songs, needed a vocalist and remembered that hearing his sister sing as she did her housework had always been a pleasant experience; thus was born Cowboy Junkies.

Their 1986 debut album, “Whites Off Earth Now!!,” was a blues tribute released only in Canada on the group’s own label, Lambent. To promote the record, the group did an extended tour of the American South that led to their discovery of and subsequent obsession with country music.

For the most part, the new “The Caution Horses” travels the same country roads they charted with “The Trinity Session” (See album review on Page 6). There is, however, one notable change. Originally a quartet, Cowboy Junkies has doubled in size with the addition of Jeff Bird (mandolin, fiddle, harmonica), Jaro Czerwinec (accordion), Kim Deschamps (pedal steel) and David Houghton (percussion).

“After touring together for a year we’ve changed from being a four-piece using sidemen into an eight-piece band,” Michael said. “The new instruments have become an integral part of Cowboy Junkies’ music, and because of that, this album is much more complex.

“Our central idea with this record was that the arrangements come through more clearly and that the record hang together as 10 little set-pieces,” he said. “The songs are all narratives of people’s lives and each one is about a relationship. I’m really proud of the writing because the songs are much more focused.

“On ‘The Trinity Session,’ the songs were large and vague because they were meant to represent genres of country music--there were travel songs, relationship songs, guy-kills-his-girlfriend songs. With this one I wanted to write little stories and develop characters, and I think some of the songs really do that.”

With Cowboy Junkies having received reams of adulatory press over the past year, the pump would appear to be primed for the success of “The Caution Horses,” but the band isn’t taking anything for granted. “This is a very weird industry, so who can say how the record will be received?” Margo said.

“And obviously there are expectations with this record,” Michael said. “We have to sell a certain amount, whereas there were no expectations at all with the last one. But now we have a bigger crew, we’re paying people’s salaries and more people are watching us. RCA doesn’t lay these pressures at our door but we know they’re there.”

“People have begun to have an image of what they think we are and we have to guard against becoming that image,” Margo said. “For instance, I get the feeling I’m supposed to be mysterious and withdrawn, and though I am a private person, I’m not mysterious. I’m not shy and if somebody approaches me I’m happy to talk with them. Nonetheless, I’ve had people say, ‘I remember seeing you when you wouldn’t even turn around and look at the audience, and I loved that.’

“I understand what they responded to in that scared girl, but people grow and you have to allow them to change. When people are paying $25 to see you, you can’t hide, and that’s forced me to jump from being a beginner to being a professional. I’m much more comfortable on stage now and we’re all really happy with the way the band progressed in the past year.”