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In the years that preceded the release of his new Decca album Join the Parade, Marc Cohn passed through several life-changing events. These events are what enabled him to reconnect with his songwriting muse, and they are in large part, what make Join the Parade an artistic, insightful and soulful statement.

Despite his time away from the recording studio, the acclaimed singer/songwriter, winner of the 1991 Grammy Award for Best New Artist, has continued to perform live and his audiences have remained steadfast. He endured the pain of divorce, but in 2002 he married news anchor Elizabeth Vargas. He struggled with writer’s block and sought to break through it with a month-long tour in the summer of 2005. The gigs went great until the night of August 7, 2005. That’s when Marc Cohn 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 two to three songs simultaneously. And these songs weren’t polite about their sudden presence either; they insisted on being written.”

Out of all this, and all that came before, comes Join the Parade, a recording that is being called Marc’s most accomplished and compelling 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. Indeed, its deep grooves, layered textures, and soulful singing make this journey a sensual pleasure.

Marc and album co-producer Charlie Sexton (Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams) have enlisted an exceptional supporting cast that includes members of Cohn’s road band (guitarist Shane Fontayne, drummer Jay Bellerose), top session players (drummers Jim Keltner and Charley Drayton, guitarist Danny Kortchmar), and such bold-face “name” guests as Tom Petty keyboard ace Benmont Tench and vocalists Shelby Lynne, N’Dea Davenport, and the Holmes Brothers.

As a whole, Join the Parade is a poignant, spiritual and moving piece of work. While the songs themselves seem to somehow connect the dots back to Cohn’s best work, the tracks, earthy and raw, are a noticeable departure from the sound of Cohn’s previous records.

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.”

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 a 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.”

“That night, at The Grammy Awards, when my name was called, was an out-of-body experience. It took me months to be able to realize how huge it was, a culmination of everything I’d worked towards for so long.”

In May 1993, Marc released The Rainy Season, which included notable guest appearances by David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Bonnie Raitt. It would be five years before a new album, 1998’s Burning the Daze, but Cohn continued to tour and write.

In 2005, Cohn compiled and self-released a solid live album, Live 04-05. But the decade that elapsed between Burning the Daze and Join the Parade was “not only longer than most people’s music business careers,” Marc notes with laughter, “it was long enough to have the record business disappear.”

Mainly, Cohn is just excited to have an album out. He hopes that Join the Parade is a set of songs that people might want to hear, but it is in truth, a set of songs that people need to hear.

Find more info at: www.marccohn.com