Play it Again, Sam #48b - "Sweet Jane"

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We are at #48b, the "cover" portion of my Play it Again, Sam music series: The Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" by the Cowboy Junkies. Cowboy Junkies are a rock band from Toronto that formed in 1985. Fronted by the beautiful, whispery vocals of Margo Timmons (brother Michael is the band's guitarist, brother Peter, the drummer, with Alan Anton on bass,) the band is, despite a very strong catalog of music, best known for their cover of "Sweet Jane," from their fantastic 1988 album, The Trinity Session. The song has been covered numerous times. In the "a" portion of this, I mentioned that a lot of the covers were done by some great bands. Check this out: Mott the Hoople, The Jim Carroll Band, and Lone Justice have all covered the tune, as has Liz Phair, Annabelle Lamb, and Brownsville Station. It's the Cowboy Junkies, however, that writer Lou Reed declared his favorite of all the remakes. While "Sweet Jane" is not exactly a hard rocking tune to begin with, the Cowboy Junkies version is especially mellow. It has become their signature song. Put it this way: the Cowboy Junkies are very capable of rocking out (listen to the psychedelic "Dragging Hooks" sometime,) yet when I saw them, it was the ethereal "Sweet Jane" that received the biggest response of the evening. And it was deserved. They really did do a bang up job on it when they covered this classic. (Fun Fact: I met Margo Timmons after a Cowboy Junkies show at the Bluebird Theater in Denver. Talk about a nice lady! She couldn't have been nicer.) (She has the same backstage rider as Ozzy info verified by Wikipedia)