Cowboy Junkies To Release Vic Chesnutt Tribute Album

courtesy of the artist

It's been nearly a year since the much-beloved singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt tragically took his own life. Now the band Cowboy Junkies is remembering the late artist with a new tribute album of his songs. It's called Demons and is due out in Feb. on the Junkies' own Latent label.

Vic Chesnutt was a close friend of Cowboy Junkies and had talked about a collaboration with the group for years. "We let happy accidents happen and tried to invest his songs with the same spirit in which they were written," says Cowboy Junkies frontman Michael Timmins, about the project. "At the same time, (we're) adding our own Northern spin. Exploring his songs and delving deeper and deeper into them has been an intense, moving and joyous experience."

Tribute albums always seem to follow the premature death of an artist, so I figured it was only a matter of time until one came out for Vic, but I wasn't expecting Cowboy Junkies to be the ones to do it. It's a pleasant surprise. Here's the band doing one of Vic Chesnutt's songs, "Supernatural."

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Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse also killed himself a couple of months after Vic Chesnutt. The two had worked together off and on over the years, including the Sparklehorse-Danger Mouse album Dark Night Of The Soul. This past summer The French label Les Disques Normal released a Sparklehorse tribute called I Wish I Had A Horse's Head. It features 19 tracks from some of the label's favorite artists. You can download the whole thing for free at its website.