Life-changing events inspire muscial work

Marc Cohn lost his parents as a child and survived a gunshot wound to the head in 2005.

By JOHN BENSON

VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

So much has happened to Grammy Award winner Marc Cohn since he played his last show a few years ago in his native Northeast Ohio.

Unfortunately, none of it was good. In August 2005, Cohn was shot in the head during a carjacking attempt that took place after a Denver show. Though he miraculously survived — the bullet was safely lodged in soft tissue outside of his skull — the experience naturally was life-changing for the 1977 Beachwood High School graduate, who at the age of 2 lost his mother and at the age of 12 lost his father.

If being shot wasn’t traumatic enough for Cohn, who at the time had three children of his own (another son has since been born), the notion of history repeating itself in some Kennedy-curse fashion did go through his mind. 

“I can you tell the first thing I thought of when I was in the back of that ambulance knowing there was a bullet in my head, I had a son that was the exact age that I was when I lost my mother,” said Cohn, calling from New York City. “He was 2 and all I kept thinking about was, ‘Please don’t let me die. I have a 2-year-old who needs me,’ and I knew damn well why.”

This life-changing event — the idea of living to see another day — coupled with the horror he watched unfold on the television in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina while convalescing a few weeks later inspired the singer-songwriter to cope in the only fashion he knew.

It was the same internal therapeutic process that he developed as a young man attempting to come to terms with the lousy hand life had dealt him.

“That’s why I’m a songwriter,” Cohn said. “There is no way to know if I would have been a songwriter had I not experienced those early traumas in my life, but I had a lot to say and I needed to express what I was feeling, even at a young age.

“That’s certainly why I started writing, there is no doubt in my mind. And it may also be why I fell in love with music. I needed some healing, and music gave it to me.”

For a ridiculously meticulous Cohn, writing new material is a painfully slow process.

His catalog only includes a 1991 self-titled debut, which features hit single “Walking in Memphis,” along with 1993’s “The Rainy Season” and 1998’s “Burning the Daze.”

However, after his near-death experience, songs naturally started to come together quickly for Cohn, who recently released his fourth studio effort, “Join the Parade.”

The album features the autobiographical “Live Out the String,” which Cohn wrote after receiving an e-mail from his high school friend Michael Silverstone.

“He wrote to me verbatim the first line of the song, ‘Maybe life is curious to see what you would do with the gift of being left alive,’” Cohn said. “And from there I wrote the whole song from his e-mail.”

Having been walked by fate to the edge of mortality but seemingly given a reprieve, Cohn, who is scheduled to perform Tuesday at the House of Blues, feels compelled to spread the simple message of enjoying every day as if it were your last.

“I had to tell myself that too, because that’s what ‘Living Out the String’ is really about,” Cohn said. “There’s a line in there that says, ‘Will you live every moment like it just might be the last or will you still just bitch and moan?’

“The truth of the matter is even after a dramatic experience like the one I had, life intervenes and you still keep bitching and moaning from time to time. So I have to keep reminding myself that every day is a gift whether you’ve been shot in the head or not.”