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Carjacking, Hurricane Inspire Cohn

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By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY, The Associated Press

Published: October 23, 2007

NEW YORK - As Marc Cohn does the publicity circuit to promote his new album, 'Join the Parade,' talk inevitably turns to the singer's carjacking two years ago, when he was shot in the head.

He talked about the shooting after it happened in 2005, but these days he's not as willing to relive the nightmare.

'It's actually one of the main things that stirs up anxiety so I have to be careful. If someone asks me to tell the story again, sometimes I can and sometimes I won't,' said Cohn, who is on a nationwide tour. 'So, yeah, telling that narrative over and over isn't particularly what I long to relive everyday.'

The shooting actually played an integral part in the creation of his new album, helping snap him out of a major writing block and record his first CD in nine years.

'I was in a particularly fragile place personally, and it's not unusual when I'm in that space for the songs to come,' he said. 'There was something I had to work through.'

Cohn, 48, was not seriously injured during the 2005 carjacking. But that wasn't the only event that year that left him emotionally spent - the Grammy winner, best known for the song 'Walking in Memphis,' said he was also torn up over the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina even though he's not from the region and has only been there a couple of times.

'It was a combination for me personally that I had gone through my own personal crisis and the fact that I'm a musician, and New Orleans to musicians isn't just an American city, it's THE American city,' he says. 'All the music that I grew up loving, a lot of it came out of New Orleans. For musicians, it was a tragedy times two.'

Cohn says he was particularly inspired by a piece by writer Rick Bragg in The Washington Post - so much that he called Bragg and asked whether he could use some of Bragg's words as lyrics. For that, Bragg is named as a co-writer on the song 'Dance Back From the Grave,' which takes its title from a phrase in Bragg's story.

'I didn't know at the time that maybe that was going to be a personal statement because I felt like that's what I needed to do. I had come that close myself to dying and was trying to find my way back to just living,' he said. 'Back to something 'normal.''

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