Cohn dances back from edge

A couple of years ago, Marc Cohn was mired in writer's block. He wanted to make another album, but he only had about half an album's worth of songs and the other half just refused to come. He felt strongly enough about waiting that he even turned down a record deal rather than make an album that wouldn't measure up. So Cohn started casting about for ways to jolt his songwriting neurons into action.

"Oh, I was doing all kinds of things to try and write," he says by phone from his New York City home. "That Randy Newman thing of sitting down in an office at 9 a.m., or going to different places -- a church on West End Avenue near where I live, changing the scenery. I tried traveling a bit. And I thought maybe a fuller-scale tour would help, too. But it didn't exactly work, at least not the way I'd originally planned."

Things went badly awry on the night of Aug. 7, 2005, when Cohn was shot in the head after a performance in Denver. Cohn was lucky to survive the attack, a random attempted carjacking. He recovered quickly, too, although the ensuing two years have been fraught with intermittent bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder. There was, however, an unexpected upside.

"Getting shot was a traumatic experience, but it did open the songwriting channels," Cohn says. "It's nothing I'd recommend. But it worked."

The result is "Join the Parade" (out Oct. 9 on Decca Records), Cohn's first studio album in nine years. To mark the occasion, Cohn is mounting his first full-band tour since the early 1990s, when he was in the headlines for "Walking in Memphis" and the 1992 best-new-artist Grammy Award. Cohn plays Cary's Booth Amphitheatre on Sunday as part of Carolina HopeFest.

Produced by Bob Dylan sideman Charlie Sexton, "Join the Parade" has a pop-soul sheen that would sound comfortable alongside John Hiatt. Cohn is in fine voice throughout, especially the perfect Al Green-styled falsetto on "If I Were an Angel."

Cohn's brush with death enters into a couple of songs, especially "Live Out the String" and "Life Goes On." But the heart of the album is a handful of songs that emerged when Cohn was at home recovering and watching Hurricane Katrina on television.

"My Sanctuary" and "Dance Back From the Grave" are the most overt New Orleans-themed songs on the album. Cohn based the latter song on a Washington Post essay by writer Rick Bragg (who gets a co-writing credit on the song), growling the lyrics in a raspy murmur somewhere between rap and spoken word: "I've seen people laughing all the way down to the cemeteries just to send another soul off on its way. Yeah, I've seen them dance right up to the edge of it. But this time, they're gonna dance back from the grave."

"That image really resonated for me in relation to my particular state at the time, because I felt like that's what I was doing, too," Cohn says. "Dancing right up to the edge of the grave, and then dancing back from it, too. The fact that I still got to walk around after being that close to death, that I could get on a plane and go back to my kids and my wife, was really something."

A native of Cleveland, Cohn actually hasn't spent that much time in New Orleans. But he hadn't spent much in Memphis, either, when he brought that city's spirit to life so evocatively with "Walking in Memphis."

As for New Orleans, Cohn says he did have one of his most important formative experiences there at age 8, when his stepmother took him to Preservation Hall. He claims he didn't want to go at first. Once there, however, he insisted on staying for about five hours -- long enough that his stepmother had to pay multiple admission charges when they didn't move along when their time was up.

"It was summer vacation, hot as hell," Cohn remembers. "But I was transfixed. The sound, the way the musicians looked, it was like the way I felt the first time I heard gospel and blues -- an immediate connection and I can't even articulate why. Growing up in Cleveland, I'd sure never heard that, even though Preservation Hall is not even seen as all that authentic. But at age 8, it was just huge.

"I thought it was so interesting that when Katrina hit, there was very little damage to Preservation Hall," Cohn continues. "I mentioned that in 'My Sanctuary' as a sign of divine intervention, that it's meant to go on. I think the whole city is meant to go on, I just wish the rest of the country would get its act together and make it so."