Marc Cohn

Artist's Website

It has been fifteen years (1992) since Marc Cohn won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and Cohn’s new release, ‘Join The Parade,’ serves to solidify Cohn’s already well-known reputation as a great American songwriter. The album is the product of his personal journey through his empathic observations after Hurricane Katrina and from a 2005 incident during which the singer found himself the victim of a carjacking in Denver, which left him with a gunshot wound to the head.

Marc Cohn was born July 5, 1959, the youngest of four boys. He grew up in Cleveland, where he began playing guitar in grade school. Through the local rock radio stations, Marc was introduced to the music of Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne, all of whom remain among his most enduring influences.

“I remember buying Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush in 1970,” said Cohn. “It had a lyric sheet that you could fold out in Neil’s own writing, with stuff crossed out or words put back in. It was at that moment that I first realized: This is his living. Somebody works at this.

“Right then, the idea of being a songwriter became appealing, even obsessive, I loved those Neil Young songs so much that I counted the number of words in ‘Tell Me Why.’ I’d write that number on the top of the page, by the title, and then try to write a song with that many words, thinking that this was some kind of portal into brilliance.”

A chance encounter in an Arkansas honky tonk with a 70-year-old black pianist and singer named Muriel Davis Wilkins inspired the song that launched Marc Cohn’s career. “Walking in Memphis” became the breakout hit from Marc’s self-titled Atlantic debut album, released February 1991.

Now comes ‘Join the Parade,’ a recording that is being called Marc’s most accomplished and compelling album to date. Cohn has translated some of his most complex and private emotions into lyrical song-poetry and then set those words to music of remarkable depth, toughness, and complexity. In doing so, Marc has created a work that is certain to touch a universal chord of memory and feeling.