MARC COHN

Grammy Award Winner Marc Cohn is a singer-songwriter perhaps best know for his hit “Walkin’ in Memphis”. He grew up in Cleveland in the 1960s and 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.”

Cohn attended Oberlin College, where he taught himself piano and later worked straight jobs, played clubs and coffee houses, wrote songs and sang demos for songwriting legends like Leiber and Stoller and Jimmy Webb. After moving to New York, he led a successful 14-piece R&B band called The Supreme Court. “Almost everything I did from the time I was sixteen, was geared towards getting a record deal.”

A chance encounter in an Mississippi 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.

Author and critic Dave Marsh wrote of the song: “Its perfectly written narrative takes into account the whole history of American music, from where it begins in storefront church gospel and W.C. Handy’s blues to where it shoots out into Elvis and Al Green and, at the climactic moment, Marc Cohn himself.”

On August 7, 2005, Cohn had a life-changing experience when he was shot in the head during a random attempted carjacking after a concert in Denver. Even though the bullet was lodged near his left temple, Marc never lost consciousness and walked out of the hospital the next day. Three weeks later, while recovering at home in New York from post-traumatic stress disorder, Cohn watched the city of New Orleans destroyed by flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“I got home a couple of days after being shot,” said Cohn. “And then Hurricane Katrina hit a few weeks later. I’m in the middle of my own crisis, and now I’m watching all these haunting images on television of thousands of people suffering through a far more horrific event. And then something I never could have predicted happened. It was like my song writing receiver got flipped into the on position. Everywhere I turned, in conversations I overheard, even in get well emails I was receiving, song ideas started coming. For several weeks, I’d be working on 2-3 songs simultaneously. And these songs weren’t polite about their sudden presence either; they insisted on being written.”

Out of all this came his 2005 album Join the Parade, in which Cohn 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. His latest album, released in 2010, is Listening Booth: 1970. Produced by Grammy-winning producer John Leventhal, the album features Marc’s personal interpretations of classic songs written by and or made famous in 1970 by Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, Eric Clapton, and several others.

Visit Marc Cohn's website.