THE Cowboy Junkies would be huge if they weren't so small. I mean, just look at the photograph that accompanies this interview. Lead singer Margo Timmins obviously is I'd drop dead if you kissed me gorgeous, a secret sister of the Corrs, particularly Andrea, my fave, night? And, oh, okay, Margo's brothers Michael and Peter, plus. Alan Anton, ain't exactly low in the high glamour stakes either.

But what's even more irresistible about Margo is that she sings like a dream, the kind of dream that is sensually so satisfying you curse when you have to wake up. A perfectly balanced blend of the earthy and the ethereal, her voice also gives the purest possible physical form to the kind of dreams capes created by her brother, Michael, in his songs.

Sadly, when it comes to that much over rated question of commercial appeal" their greatest strength, artistically, is also their greatest weakness. These particular Junkies songs really are too quiet to compete with the kind of screaming soundscapes that dominate rock music even though the terror at the centre of cuts like Mariner's Song is totally true to the hellhound on my trail blues ethos that originally defined rock and made a track like the band's version of Sweet Jane so suitable for Oliver Stone's movie, Natural Born Killers.

Indeed, the songs of the Cowboy Junkies are so quiet they make for ideal morning after music. After battle. After the bottle. After drugs. After sex.

After the loss of love. Particularly the latter, if you're the kind of romantic who takes solace from music. How's this for a couplet capturing this condition I'd rather listen to Coltrane/Than go through all that shit again," from the characteristically conversational Sun Comes Up. It's Tuesday Morning. So is this true of Margo, Michael, or who?

"Music, for me, has always been something that I fall back to, no matter what's going on in my life, mind, mood. It's something that has always fed me. And those are my lyrics, so I guess it's more a reflection of me," says Michael, speaking for the band because Margo, unfortunately, "doesn't do interviews during tours apparently preferring to preserve her voice for singing.

And though there probably was a morning I felt I'd rather listen to jazz, I don't really write so much about specifics, as I do about ideas, moments, emotions, which are galvanised from different parts of my life."

SURELY Michael has no choice other than to make his songs transcend the self, given that he is writing for his sister's voice, specifically in compositions like Thirty Simmers, which is presented from a female perspective? So is it that he's blessed with the ability, rare among male songwriters, to fathom the female psyche or believes that the soul has no gender or that he simply switches gender in his songs?

"Well, it is absolutely true that if my songs were specific to myself, they would be harder of Margo to put herself into and reinterpret," he responds.

"Likewise, in terms of audiences. Lyrics have to have a ways to reflect the aggregate self. Yet, in some songs, I do write from my own perspective and then just switch genders. In others, I attempt to write from the point of view of a female character. Thirty Summers, for sure, was written from a female perspective. Yet I also agree that the soul has no gender.

"A lot of people argue that certain emotions, ways of reacting to love, are female, and other ways, male. Those, to me, are stereotypes that don't ring true. I would hope our music proves that fact, that the songs can be sung from any angle. Margo certainly feels her way into my songs, without ever really needing me to guide her, or even tell her what I think a song is about."

Michael has used the phrase "family telepathy" to describe this process. But what, to him, is the defining factor in the sound of Cowboy Junkies the familial base, Margo's voice, his songs or guitar licks? And, peeking more into the psychology of the Timmins clan, are they all sad hearted, broken, busted romantics, which is probably the popular perception of the band?

"Well, first, in terms of the sound, it is those things you mention, plus the overall rhythm and pulse of the band which probably also has to do with telepathy, because three of the band members are family," Michael says, laughing.

"But, yeah, we are romantics.

Certainly Margo is, and I am. But we're not sad hearted, we haven't all been squashed! In fact, we're all happily married. So it's just a matter of expressing a certain side of our nature in those songs and the fact that the whole body of our work covers nearly a 10 year period, including times when we clearly were battered by love."

Okay, Michael, let's run a line between, say, two Junkies albums, the breakthrough disc, The Trinity Session and their latest, Lay It Down. Their press release claims the sound has changed, fundamentally, as Michael's guitar moves more to the fore, but, let's face it, couldn't any fan of the band skip from Sweet Jane to the title song of the new CD and say, so, hey, what's new?

"I agree," says Michael. It's not that we have radically changed. We stumbled on a musical identity quite early in our career and it's not something we fight against. So what we try to change, album go album, can be just something as simple as the lyrical themes or instrumentation. Small changes. A lot of critics may have a problem with that, but we don't."

NOT Irish critics, who have always responded favourably to the moody and humorous aspects of the Cowboy Junkies's music, even back as far as The Trinity Session, where they turned Blue Moon into a death song.

"That was our song for Elvis, because we were huge Elvis fans and his version of Blue Moon is really moody, eerie and on the edge of what we would later express more explicitly," Michael reflects. "Back in the 1950s, you couldn't really do that, though the way he recorded that song, the sound definitely is surreal, especially his voice.

"That's what The Trinity Session was about, taking some of the traditions and standards of rock, blues and country and making them into our own. Like Blue Moon, Sweet Jane, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. And also adding our own originals, like Misguided angel, which are in the very Irish tradition of murdering the one you love."

Okay, since he has mentioned murder, what did Michael Timmins think of the way Sweet Jane was used in the rather garrulous Natural Born Killers movies "Well, I liked the way it was used and the different editing and film stocks, but I'm not an Oliver Stone fan, to tell you the truth, he says. So, is Michael a fan of contemporary country music which clearly has bastardised the blending of all the musical genres he mentioned earlier, leading Willie Nelson to claim recently that he "totally agrees" with the sentiments of a song soon to be released in the US called You Call It Country, I Call It Bad Rock `n' Roll.

"Exactly, that's a great title," he says, laughing loudly. "That's what I say too. It's just really bad rock music. It's disgusting I haven't heard a good, new country artist in such a long time, which is a sad thing for me to have to say, when, as you know, it was discovering country music back in the 1980s that turned our sound around, from its blues base. But, the only guys I'll still checkout are people like Willie Waylon Jennings."

So, which of all these multi dimensional influences fed directly into tracks such as the relatively funky Speaking Confidentially or Angel Mine, from the new album? Maybe Coltrane, in terms of those guitar licks? Does Michael listen to the more avant garde jazz giants or was that just a line?

"Angel Mine is like a nod to our own song Misguided Angel, in fact. But, overall, nothing influences me from these days, really. Though I love newer acts like Vie Chestnut and Gillian Welsh," he responds. "And I definitely love Coltrane. Even before Cowboy Junkies, people like Coltrane, Coleman and Derek Bailey were people I loved for their sense of timing, rhythm and off the wall melodic flavour. That's the stuff I'd concentrate on, if I was to concentrate just on playing the guitar."

Yet isn't this, ultimately, what makes the music of the Cowboy Junkies so dynamic specifically on the new album, where those occasional dissonant guitar licks make a magnificent counterpoint to Margo's silken voice and the band's more linear rhythms?

"I hope so, and that's what I want to do more and more, Michael says. "And I want to play more guitar. Because, really, on our first record Whites Off Earth Now I did play a lot. All of this is what I want to integrate into the sound even more on future albums."