Cowboy Junkies Cover Townes Van Zandt

In a happy coincidence, I was reading Jody’s Philip’s post on Townes Van Zandt while listening to the Cowboy Junkies’ gorgeous cover of his song, “To Live is To Fly”. It’s one of my favourite Junkies song. It’s unusually upbeat, though it does feature a couple of their characteristic tempo changes. It is, might I venture, even uplifting? The chorus goes:

To live is to fly low and high
so shake the dust off of your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes

Van Zandt wrote the song specifically for the Junkies, as he helped produce their third album (probably my favourite, on balance, and a great place to start if you’re unfamiliar with the band). Van Zandt died a couple of years later, but the band regularly cites what an influence he was. In the second verse, he writes specifically about parting from the band:

It’s goodbye to all my friends
It’s time to go again
Think of all the poetry
and the pickin’ down the line
I’ll miss the system here
the bottom’s low and the treble’s clear
but it don’t pay to think too much
on the things you leave behind

The song is full of that great, countrified wisdom. It also features kick-ass mandolin and fiddle solos. Here it is:

• Cowboy Junkies – To Live is To Fly (MP3, 4:53, 5.7 MB)

UPDATE: Philip wrote to politely correct me, because I got this all wrong. As it turns out Van Zandt wrote this song in 1972, while most of the Junkies were playing in the sand box. He did write another song specifically for the Junkies on the same album–“Cowboy Junkies’ Lament”–so it’s understandable how I might have assumed the same about “To Live is To Fly”.