The Cowboy Junkies Pick Up the Pace . . . Very, Very Slightly

Cowboy Junkies guitarist Michael Timmins is discussing his band’s latest album, “Black-Eyed Man,” comparing its moderate pace with the slower, sleepier rhythms of past recordings and going so far as to describe one song, “Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park,” as “up-tempo.”

“Relatively up-tempo,” he quickly corrects himself.

Such qualifying terms are indeed relative in the heretofore somnambulistic world of the Cowboy Junkies, where what would stand as a slow ballad in most other rock bands’ repertoires might pass for a particularly peppy entry in the Junkies’ quiet oeuvre . Most famously, the group’s critically acclaimed major-label debut--”The Trinity Session,” hailed in The Times critics’ poll as the best album of ‘88--moved along at a gorgeous crawl, which was part of its distinguishing charm.

The new album, the Toronto-based band’s fourth, won’t be mistaken for a dance record either. But it does offer a wider variety of mid-tempo numbers, which promise to make the Junkies’ shows scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and Friday at the Pantages Theatre (the latter also features co-headliner John Prine) less outrightly hypnotic, more toe-apping affairs.

But in branching out and attempting to grow, will the Junkies end up sacrificing their defining uniqueness?

“I think the obvious side of our sound comes from ‘The Trinity Session,’ which is very sparse and spacey and hushed,” says Timmins. “And there are gonna be certain people who liked the quiet hush of ‘Trinity’ who won’t like this, but hopefully there’ll be just as many people who didn’t like that who prefer this.”

Slow or no, what’s clear is that the Cowboy Junkies no longer own the band-of-the-moment mantle--not like three years ago, when critics couldn’t stop gushing, “Saturday Night Live” was calling and gigs were overrun by hipsters.

Says Margo Timmins, the group’s singer and Michael’s sister: “It was great that everybody really liked it and bought it, but there was a point where the hype got too much. It was hard because people were coming to our show because it was the cool thing to come to.

“Once that left, on the ‘Caution Horses’ tour, it was much more normal.”

Besides picking up the pace a bit, another obvious change has been the shift from interpretations of outside material toward focusing primarily on Michael’s able songwriting.

Many of his new songs are set in the South--a regional fascination he seems to share with other Canadian songwriters who’ve come before him.

“My wife’s from Virginia and I spend a fair amount of time down there, so that’s where that Southern element springs from, although I was interested in it even before meeting her,” he says. “I grew up listening to Neil Young and Robbie Robertson, so that has to rub off. It’s in Canadians’ bones to analyze the Americans, trying to figure out what they’re going to do next. . . . “