Concert Review - Cowboy Junkies - Auckland - 4th November 2025

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5 Nov

Written By Megan Moss

Presented By David Roy WIlliams DRW Entertainment

Image Credit - Megan Moss Photographer

Review by: Faith Hamblyn

Artist/Band: Cowboy Junkies

Venue/City: Venue, Auckland Town Hall, Auckland, NZL

Date of Event: Tuesday 4th November 2025

Cowboy Junkies started their tour tonight at Auckland’s Town Hall, bathed in pink and purple lights staged like disparate strangers behind them on the amphitheatre seating. Opening with Misguided Angel from The Trinity Session, they were conspicuously five – they brought Jeff Bird with them with his mandolin to add to the Americana which the stage rugs evoked. Margo was centre stage next to blood-red roses, all in black with selected sparkle, like a left-behind beautiful siren at a funeral.

Cause Cheap Is How I Feel from The Caution Horses underlined the theatrical theme, with its Southern gothic betrayal, and This Is What I Lost sounded like a Western’s last stand. The songs from Such Ferocious Beauty have a subtext of a hard-fought loss, like losing to battle or booze or time. Hard To Build Easy, To Break is rock and roll, fast and furious compared to the usual folk, but Circe And Penelope brought it back to the ongoing theme of beauty and dust.

Lay It Down’s A Common Disaster lives in the traditional country world of misery loving company; more Melissa Etheridge than reverent musings. The first set ended with John Lee Hooker’s Forgive Me from Whites Off Earth Now!! With the live version, the rumbling proud-man blues is transformed into snarling woman laying down the law; hell hath no fury, as they say.

The second set opened with All That Reckoning, which sounds like Cocteau Twins meets This Mortal Coils’ Song To The Siren. Blue and green light bathed the band, and they sounded like waves lapping the shore. Shapes projected on the walls and ceiling enveloped us into the show’s embrace.

Sweet Jane was received rapturously, as it is legend; marrying avant-garde with country to help birth alt-country. They performed it with a more Lou Reed tempo than on The Trinity Session, and it was harder than when they last reworked it with guest stars. It was more standing on the corner waiting for the man than a prayer this time around.

The Caution Horses’ Where Are You Tonight? was a last slow dance to Patsy Cline’s Crazy in a past-closing bar. We were lulled by the sway, the tale, and became a part of it. Margo found a baseball-hatted boy in the audience’s front row to sing to, which seems integral in a torch song.

We heard the wry story of To Love Is To Bury and how folk music always seems to turn dark. Couples going down to the river never ends well, and that was the theme here, with Jeff Bird on harmonica wailing like a departing train. Unanswered Letter continued the theme of country pathos in a broad and desolate land.

For their cover of Bruce Springsteen’s State Trooper, the lights were cop-car blue and the hall’s huge pipe organ military green. Margo’s prayer for the trooper, ‘Don’t stop me’, and the suspense of Jeff Bird’s lap steel guitar and the steady drumbeat sounded like the inevitability of the law catching up, with the sound of driving wheels alongside the cymbals sounding like passing trains.

Blue Moon ended the set proper, a dreamy, nostalgic cover. There’s unusual closure in that - finally someone’s back in baby’s arms. There’s something unsettling about it, though – can something so unlikely last?

The last song was my favourite Cowboy Junkies cover nowadays, now that their version of Sweet Jane is vintage in its own right – Patsy Cline’s Walking After Midnight. Theirs is bluesy, miles away from Cline’s hiccupping and losing her senses. Margo, driven by her demons, straight to your door, no matter how far away you might be; the country blues demands it.

Margo Timmins - vocals
Mike Timmins - guitar
Pete Timmins - drums
Alan Anton - bass
Jeff Bird - acoustic and electric mandolins, lap steel guitar, harmonica, percussion