Some music embraces you in a friendly way, other music takes possession of you. The songs fill a hole that you did not know. You have to hear them, every day, over and over again, because you already miss them before they have finished.
Then habit formation comes creeping in. You already know what still has to come: that thorny, addictive production that underlines the lyrics so perfectly. About music, once his first love, about inspiration, loss and saying goodbye. About loyalty and love, anger, about getting back from a prospectless position and going on, despite everything.
Of course, meanwhile you sing along with them. That is because you only play this cd when you are alone: nobody else undergoes it like you. In the meantime, your memory reduces the songs to MP3-format: stripped of all the layers that determine the sound and of the vocal nuances that illustrate his emotions.
All of a sudden you only hear your own voice. Your voice breaks down: beautiful songs reduced to background music.
Therefore I do not allow Marc Cohn’s Join The Parade to rustle from the loudspeakers that often. Just because there was that itch again, that first time. His pain is mine, although we lead different lives.
Between that previous one and this one Cohn lost his inspiration for nine years. A new love did not return that to him either. Neither did he find it back when he searched for it on stages in 2005. After such a concert he was shot in the head though. The thief was already in his car, ready to drive away, but Cohn did not die.
While he recovered, the question kept running through his head why it made sense that he did not die that night. Meanwhile on tv hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. All of a sudden the songs came pouring out of him, like water over the levees. They circled around the big questions, without dictating the answers.
Cohn was not only hit in the head, that thief also unintendedly shot his armour to pieces. He got a thirty-six years sentence. Cohn might as well be grateful to him, just as I am.
Published in Dutch in roots music magazine Heaven no. 53 March-April 2008/no.2