New album brings Cowboy Junkies to the Bing on Sunday

When he spoke with the Spokesman-Review in July 2017, guitarist Michael Timmins shared that his band Cowboy Junkies was in the studio recording its upcoming album.

That album, “All That Reckoning,” was released in July 2018.

“All That Reckoning” is the Canadian blues/country/folk/rock band’s first batch of new material since releasing a box set called “Notes Falling Slow” in 2015 that featured remastered versions of 2001’s “Open,” 2004’s “One Soul Now” and 2007’s “At the End of Paths Taken,” plus previously unreleased tracks.

Clearing songs out of the Cowboy Junkies vault made for a fun project, but it didn’t inform the band when it came time to work on “All That Reckoning.”

“When we write a new record, we rarely look at what we have, it’s always about looking forward…” Timmins said. “At this point in our career, I think it’s more just ‘OK it’s time to start making a record. Let’s start writing and figure out where we are and where we want to go’.”

Where they wanted to go, it turned out, was down a path exploring personal and political happenings.

“There’s a lot of pressures and a lot of crumbling of institutions, very little foundation to put one’s feet on again, especially at an older age,” Timmins told Billboard in May. “You sort of expect things to be there and realize, ‘My God, what I thought was a standard, whether it be an institution or a way of dealing with people in our society, is disappearing.’ ”

Timmins makes it clear the band doesn’t have any definitive solutions to that crumbling though.

“To me it’s a reaffirmation,” he told Billboard. “I think the reckoning is still going on. When the song comes back it’s not saying ‘OK, we’re all good now.’ It’s saying ‘OK, it continues on and we deal with it.’ ”