Miles from Our Home
1998 album by Cowboy Junkies
Miles from Our Home is the seventh studio album by Canadian alt-country band Cowboy Junkies, which was released in 1998. It was their second and final album for Geffen Records. The title track was a significant hit in their native Canada. Following this album, the Junkies were dropped from the Geffen record label. The Junkies moved to an independent label, Latent Recordings, for their subsequent albums.
Album development
Prior to writing new material, Michael Timmins spent a month collecting various segments of lyrical and musical ideas that were accumulated over the past year. At the start of the intended writing process, The Cowboy Junkies heard the news that Townes Van Zandt had died. Van Zandt was perhaps the biggest influence as a songwriter on Michael, showcasing songs that were peep-holes into the soul. Michael wrote the first draft of "Blue Guitar" the day that he heard Van Zandt died, "as a tribute to the man who had the bluest guitar that I had ever heard." However, the song wasn't finished at the time, and was put away for a while. The following month, Michael came into possession of some of Van Zandt's unpublished and unfinished lyrics, including one titled "Screams from the Kitchen" which had lyrics that just popped out.
“Miles from Our Home” enters the record as 1998 album by Cowboy Junkies. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Miles, Home and album can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Miles from Our Home” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Miles, Home and album provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3314095. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Miles from Our Home”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Miles from Our Home primary sources, Miles from Our Home archive and Miles research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Miles from Our Home”?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Miles from Our Home” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.