Marc Cohn: Listening Booth; 1970 (Sony)

 |   |  <1 min read

Marc Cohn: No Matter What (with Aimee Mann)
Marc Cohn: Listening Booth; 1970 (Sony)

The way singer-songwriter Cohn remembers it, 1970 was when the Beatles, and Simon and Garfunkel, broke up. It was classic singles, the dawn of the singer-songwriter era (James Taylor, Neil Young and others), great albums by various solo Beatles, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Creedence . . .

So he goes back to that year for this collection of covers of those influences, but turns some of the spare originals (Stevens' Wild World, Lennon's Look At Me, McCartney's much covered Maybe I'm Amazed) into over-ripe and earnest productions – although with India.Arie he brings intimate warmth to Bread's Make It With You and remakes Paul Simon's The Only Living Boy in New York into his own with a slow treatment.

And he does the same with Badfinger's power-pop ballad No Matter What.

He might strip the swamp-funk out of J.J. Cale's After Midnight but he takes it into a neatly slink direction. Cohn has a default position of MOR/politeness which means the Box Tops' anxious The Letter here comes of all cool mood, and Van Morrison's Into the Mystic doesn't take flight as it should. But the Grateful Dead's New Speedway Boogie brushes up sharp with deft touches by guitarist John Leventhal, and there's a moving, slow version of Creedence's Long As I Can See the Light.

Mixed results from the year which also gave us Rolf Harris' Two Little Boys . . . not included here.

Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

Larry's Rebels: I Feel Good (Frenzy)

Larry's Rebels: I Feel Good (Frenzy)

This weekend for Record Store Day there is a vinyl release of a Larry's Rebels collection which pulls together their r'n'b sound on one side and the later psych-pop on the other. But for those... > Read more

Into the East: Fight from the Inside (intotheeast.co.nz/Aeroplane)

Into the East: Fight from the Inside (intotheeast.co.nz/Aeroplane)

This duo might come from Southland in New Zealand but they could just as surely have found a foothold in the American Midwest with songs like the catchy On the Run (a slightly reshaped rockabilly... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

TAR, a film by 12 DIRECTORS

TAR, a film by 12 DIRECTORS

A visual ode to memory, love, loss of innocence and the spectre of impending death because of the events at Three Mile Island, this film is an elusive construction drawing on the poems of the... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Passages

Elsewhere Art . . . Passages

I have mentioned previously how, in 1984, I launched the ambitious -- so ambitious it was doomed -- magazine Passages: The Magazine of Jazz and Elsewhere. And how at one point the late Jim... > Read more