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Label: Decca
Sound/Style: Alternative adult pop/rock, melodically thin but heavy on atmosphere and poetic sensibilities
By Steve Morley
On his 1991 hit “Walkin’ In Memphis,” Marc Cohn took a pilgrimage that moved from sightings of Elvis Presley’s ghost to an encounter with the Holy Spirit just before the song’s sanctified final chorus. (“…I sang with all my might/ And she said ‘Tell me, are you a Christian, child?’/ And I said ‘Ma’am, I am tonight.’”) On his latest album, Cohn again spots the specters of musicians and finds the spiritual link therein, this time in a different but equally influential mecca of American music—New Orleans. The city’s catastrophic losses in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina offer a context ripe for exploration, and Cohn dives in chest-deep to find artistic ways to frame the tragedy, drawing inspiration from vintage soul music and invoking the mystical quality of mid-period Van Morrison. The singer/songwriter’s unique and impressionistic treatment of the subject forms the core of Join the Parade, his first album in nearly a decade.
On the eerie strains of “Dance Back From the Grave,” Cohn predicts a full-scale recovery for New Orleans. The song pays tribute to both the hundreds of lives lost in post-Katrina floods and the emotionally loaded tradition of the jazz funeral, which mourns as well as celebrates the saints marching into the promised afterlife. (“Yeah, I’ve seen people laughin’/ All the way down to the cemetery/ Just to send another soul off on its way/ I’ve seen them dancin’ right up to the edge of it/ But this time they’re gonna dance back from the grave.”) Late in the disc, Cohn revisits the themes in “Dance Back” on “My Sanctuary,” a track that, like “Walkin’ in Memphis,” blurs the lines between religion and the mysterious force of music. (“And the music keeps right on playing/ ‘Cause of all the places water wouldn’t fall/ It wasn’t the churches or the chapels/ It was down at the Preservation Hall/ ‘This is my sanctuary’/ You could almost hear the ghost of some old trumpet player say/ ‘Lay down the burdens you carry/ In my sanctuary.’”)
The surreal track “The Calling” finds a similar connection, constructing a scene in which the spirit of 1930s jazz guitarist Charlie Christian moves an unsuspecting train rider to an inexplicable sense of higher purpose.
While the tragedy of Katrina informs the album, Cohn’s focus on the tenuous thread between living and dying isn‘t merely external—it draws from his own brush with mortality in a carjacking attempt just weeks prior to the hurricane. His close call with a stray bullet adds first-person resonance to “Live Out the String,” which deals with survivor guilt and poses a provocative question: what do you do with the gift of being left alive?
One of the things Cohn opts to do with his extended lease on life is dispense with unresolved emotions on tracks like the confessional “Listening to Levon” and “Giving Up the Ghost,” a pointed spin on a phrase that usually means surrendering to death. It’s one of several times that Cohn grasps the slippery and unsettling truth about the inherently transitory nature of existence. He neither paints that fact black nor attempts to bury it in glossy hues on the sober, yet subtly joyful, Join the Parade—a song cycle that reminds us even the most celebratory of moments has a beginning and an end.
Audio Clips
"Listening To Levon"
"The Calling"
"Dance Back From The Grave"
"If I Were An Angel"
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