Recorded in one take with a single microphone in a Toronto church, this 1988 album perfected whisper-to-a-scream dynamics and redefined what a cover could be. The Trinity Session is essential for anyone who thinks country-folk can't haunt you.
The church was cold. November 1987, the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, and the band had brought in a single Calrec Ambisonic microphone — a fat, Swedish-made sphere that captured everything in the room, including the radiator hiss and the creak of pews. They set up in a semicircle around it, played through the whole set twice, and that was it. No overdubs. No headphones. No second chances.
What you hear is what happened in that room: Margo Timmins’ voice arriving from somewhere behind the altar, Michael Timmins’ guitar strings buzzing against the pickup, Peter Timmins’ kick drum sounding like a pillow being dropped down stairs. Engineer Peter J. Moore ran the tape direct to a Sony PCM-F1 digital processor because the church’s ambient noise made analog hiss unbearable. The result is an album that sounds like a ghost locked out of its own house.
“Sweet Jane” is the one everyone knows, and rightly so. Margo doesn’t sing it so much as let it fall out of her mouth at quarter speed, like she’s reading a postcard that arrived thirty years late. Lou Reed heard it and said it was the best cover of his song he’d ever heard. He wasn’t wrong. But the deeper cut is “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” — Hank Williams already wrote the loneliest two minutes in country music, and the Junkies stretch it into a seven-minute dirge where the silence between notes does more work than most bands do with whole choruses.
“Misguided Angel” unfolds like a Polaroid in slow developer. “Walkin’ After Midnight” strips Patsy Cline’s coyness down to bare bones. And “To Love Is to Bury” — that’s the one where you realize the whole record is about the weight of love as a kind of burial. The band plays so quietly you can hear the tape noise between Margo’s words. That’s the point.
The Trinity Session was released in 1988 on Latent Records, then picked up by RCA. It sold over a million copies despite sounding like it was recorded inside a confessional. The Timmins siblings and Alan Anton have never tried to make it again — they’ve made other records, some of them very good, but never this again. You don’t get two miracles out of the same church.