Cowboy Junkets : The Group Takes a Little Pleasure Trip Through the Land of Power Chords

When they toured in 1989, riding the success of their breakthrough album, “The Trinity Session,” Cowboy Junkies were hawking souvenir T-shirts that would have warmed a librarian’s heart.

“Shhhhh,” read the T-shirt slogan, which couldn’t have been more appropriate to the Toronto rock band’s internalized, ruminative take on its country, folk and blues influences.

Now, five years on, Cowboy Junkies is announcing itself with a clannng --which is more or less the sound of the thick power chords that open the band’s latest album, “Pale Sun, Crescent Moon.”

By the album’s end, Margo Timmins, the singer known for her preternatural hush, can be heard declaring herself with assertive bite:

It’s a (expletive) ole world

But this ole girl, well she ain’t giving in.

While Cowboy Junkies hasn’t exactly turned into a hard-rock band (the closely drawn, highly literate, mood-conscious internal monologue remains the signature of the band’s style), those aggressive opening and closing moments do signal a desire to avoid being typecast as that whispering band that found success by recording in an echoing church.

“With this album, we definitely wanted to bring up the volume a bit,” said guitarist Michael Timmins, Margo’s older brother and, as Cowboy Junkies’ songwriter and record producer, the leading architect of the band’s sound. The group performs tonight and Sunday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

“We’ve been moving away from the ‘Trinity Session’ feel for a while. With every record, we’ve tried to add a different element,” he said. “The idea of a power-chord opening (for the new album) was a conscious thought.”

In a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Wisconsin, Timmins said that his sister has had to put conscious effort into singing some of the more-demanding roles he has written for her.

“The ones she has the easiest time on are the straight love songs. Temperament wise, she’s very mild and mellow, and she’d prefer to sing ballads,” he said. “If somebody would let her, she’d sing ballads all the time.”

Instead, Michael has presented Margo with such songs as “Hunted” and “Floorboard Blues,” the concluding tracks that give the current album an eerie final twist. Most of the songs on “Pale Sun, Crescent Moon” are evocative snapshots of relationships in jeopardy. But the characters of the two final songs are women who fear they are being stalked by rapists.

To sing them, Timmins said, Margo “has to find a spot that isn’t natural to her. She just has to stretch herself a bit. If she has to stretch her style, it’s more interesting for me and for her. Usually, she ends up giving the most interesting bperformances (on) the ones she has to work hardest on to find the character, to find her way into the song.”

The creative process can get testy for rock bands in which one member writes the songs while somebody else sings them. The Who was legendary for its tussles between writer Pete Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey, and serious fallout developed in the Band between Robbie Robertson, who wrote the songs, and other members who sang them.

Michael Timmins notes that people might assume working relationships would be even more explosive within Cowboy Junkies, where sibling rivalries are added to the usual tinder that sets off internal flare-ups (besides Michael, 35, and Margo, 33, the core lineup includes younger brother Peter Timmins, 28, on drums, and bassist Alan Anton).

But so, far, he said, Cowboy Junkies has enjoyed a relatively unruffled nine-year existence.

“We haven’t been at it as long as the Who and the Band were. But I think in our case, the brother-and-sister relationship makes it less (tense), because we understand each other very well. Our personalities don’t seem to conflict. We all have our roles and like what we do, and give each other enough space.”

Michael Timmins, who grew up in Montreal, “was always fascinated by music. I remember asking to get the (Beatles’) ‘white album’ for Christmas when I was 9 years old.”

Along with his friend Anton, he went off to pursue that fascination during the early 1980s in bands based in New York and London. Returning to Canada in 1985, they formed Cowboy Junkies, with Peter drumming and Margo, a rock ‘n’ roll novice, fronting the band.

The Junkies’ 1986 debut album, “Whites Off Earth Now!!” consisted almost entirely of old blues covers.

“We never started with the intention of working on our own material,” Timmins said. “I’d just come from a band that was totally instrumental. I’d written songs before but got bored with it.

Playing blues material, he said, “gave Margo the opportunity to work on melody ideas and fool around with her voice without worrying too much what the lyrics were. With those blues songs, she could take those words and use them as a vehicle for her voice. When we were comfortable with what we were doing musically, I began writing again, and the narrative elements began to grow.”

Few rock songwriters who have emerged since the late ‘80s take the care Timmins displays in etching his songs with the sort of narrative detail normally employed by prose storytellers.

In a typical Cowboy Junkies song, you know what the weather is--there are hints that allow you to visualize settings and conceive a picture of the characters in them. The emotional weather they’re facing also becomes clear, but Timmins often will leave out a key element of plot, leaving to the listener’s imagination the specific turn of events that has brought his characters to a crisis.

We don’t know precisely what crisis the couple in “Ring on the Sill” faces, only that they realize their marriage stands in the balance, and that it’s a terribly scary moment for them. In “Seven Years,” the damage already has been done between

the song’s narrator and her estranged child. Timmins doesn’t tell us what has passed, but we see the emotional fallout.

“I like to take a certain element of a life and focus in great detail on that slice of life,” he said. “And I’ll leave it to the listener to extrapolate into the future and the past. If I’ve drawn the picture well enough, the listener can let those characters move out of that scene and take them where they want to take them.”

That approach hasn’t taken “Pale Sun, Crescent Moon” into the upper reaches of the pop charts (it peaked at No. 114 on the Billboard’s album chart), and Timmins acknowledges there is a tension between investing a song with narrative acuity and detail, and investing it with pop appeal.

“There are some songs, like in ‘Anniversary Song,’ where I’m attempting to write a pop song,” Timmins said, referring to a bright, catchy track from the new album that sounds like a marriage of Motown and 10,000 Maniacs. “But I still want my detail. There are a lot of lyrics and imagery in there, which I like. There’s a little more to it than the average pop song.”

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In other instances, he said, the band has dropped pop elements from an arrangement because they took away from the mood of a narrative. Referring to the single from the group’s 1992 album, “Black Eyed Man,” Timmins said: “ ‘A Horse in the Country’ didn’t do well at radio, and I could have made it more radio-friendly by repeating the chorus or getting to the chorus sooner,” Timmins said. “There were more hooks, but we felt it didn’t add to the song, so we took them out.”

Timmins says that the astonishing success of “The Trinity Session” positioned Cowboy Junkies to be able to make choices on the basis of artistic considerations instead of commercial ones. The now-legendary album, cut live in a single 14-hour session in a Toronto church, cost $250 to produce and went on to sell almost 1 million copies. “It establishes you with the record company,” Timmins said. “They haven’t put a lot of money into it, but they’ve made a lot off of you.”

Don’t look for “Trinity II,” though.

“Even if we wanted to do that, we could never do it,” he said. “That was a special recording, done in total anonymity and without any expectation.”

* Cowboy Junkies and Freedy Johnston play tonight and Sunday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. All but the Sunday late show are sold out. $25. (714) 496-8930.