Soul Man
MARC COHEN HAS BLENDED GENRES DURING HIS 30-YEAR CAREER BY LAURA LATZKO
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arly in his career, Grammy Award-winning artist Marc Cohn reached listeners around the world with his hit song “Walking in Memphis.” His drive to keep creating meaningful music, with other musicians who inspire him, continues to motivate him decades later. Cohn will perform his R&B-, blues- and gospel-inspired style of music at the Canyon at the Rose on Thursday, April 16. He will even take requests from the audience and share stories about the songs he’s singing. “It’s usually a very intimate, very off-the-cuff show that involves a lot of storytelling and songwriting,” Cohn says. Even then he’s a bit coy. He tries to still leave his songs open for interpretation because he has found that audience members respond to them in different ways. “I’m often hesitant to say too much because what’s really important is what does it say to them?” Cohn says. “That’s why I don’t say too much about what it’s about. I just like to tell stories about how the first spark of inspiration comes.” During live shows, he and his band change up the music to keep older songs, such as “Walking in Memphis,” fresh for him and the audience. “I don’t play my songs exactly as they are on the record. It doesn’t interest me to do that. Those arrangements of old songs are constantly evolving. That’s what keeps me engaged and I hope the audience engaged,” Cohn says. Concerts also allow him to play some of his more obscure songs. “That’s a big part of what motivates me to tour. I think I have an interesting catalog of songs, so I’m always anxious to play those, along with the ones that everybody comes to hear,” Cohn says. Starting out in his career, Cohn produced a number of albums in the 1990s before taking a break from recording from 1998 to 2007. He came back with “Join the Parade,” an album which featured a song called “Parade,” which was inspired by the events of Hurricane Katrina and his near-fatal shooting during a carjacking in 2005. In 2016, during the 25th anniversary of his self-titled platinum album, Cohn released “Careful What You Dream: Lost Songs and Rarities,” a collection of unreleased material from before he was signed. In recent years, he has been writing for, working with and touring with musical greats such as Bonnie Raitt, Patty Griffin, Graham Nash, William Bell, Michael McDonald and David Crosby. For his most recent album, “Work to Do,” Cohn collaborated with the gospel group Blind Boys of Alabama. The album, which he describes as a “pop record infused with gospel quartet sound,” contains live recordings with him and the group, new songs from Cohn and an old gospel song he reworked to fit his own sound. The Blind Boys of Alabama is a group that he grew up listening to and admiring. “It’s the best part of what I do. I’ve had collaborations with some of my biggest heroes, and they are among them,” Cohn says. He is in the early process of writing songs for his next record and will occasionally throw those tracks in his set. 30 | ARROYO | 04.20
