Digging Deep

It’s a truism that artists need vivid life experience, especially the unwanted kind that can deepen a person and yield hard-won insight.

The latest proof is Marc Cohn’s new album, “Burning the Daze.” It is one of those unforeseeable leaps forward, where a pop artist takes a Bob Beamon-like jump and enters a new orbit of accomplishment.

On two previous albums, including his million-selling 1991 debut, Cohn was an intelligent, close observer of emotional life, practicing strong craftsmanship and applying good influences from classic rock and soul. Yet he lacked that thrilling, probing, intense something extra. Cohn’s records didn’t approach the standard for contemporary male pop-rock troubadours set by John Hiatt, Los Lobos or Freedy Johnston.

With “Burning the Daze,” a change is quickly apparent. Something piercing now lives in Cohn’s treble range, a previously absent pang of deep feeling. It’s honest and affecting, sometimes harking back in homage to the noble woundedness of the Band’s Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, sometimes taking on the edge of Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, but without the shameless, off-putting whine. (Cohn said he despises over-emoting and grandstanding in a singer.)

The songs embody profound losses and estrangements with terse storytelling--or evoke them with parables and metaphors. From the opening “Almost Home,” Cohn’s theme is a journey through loss and alienation to a sense of inner completeness. He ends with “Ellis Island,” a starkly unsentimental account of the immigrant experience, and gains enormous emotional resonance by setting a personal epiphany against a memorably rendered backdrop of epic history.

Cohn, who begins his U.S. tour tonight at the Coach House, backed by two other musicians, said he knew while making the record that his music and singing had changed. Speaking last week from a noisy apartment (his upstairs neighbors were remodeling, to his chagrin) on New York’s Upper West Side, he wasn’t sure what brought about the change.

“There wasn’t anything specific I was trying to do, but the songs are a little different, and that may bring out different things in your voice. I don’t know what it’s a function of, but time may change the way you sing. It’s nothing conscious, I can tell you that.”

“Burning the Daze” emerges after several years of personal upheaval that contributed to the five-year gap since Cohn’s second album, “The Rainy Season.”

He realized after his last tour that personal issues--mainly the need to patch a fraying marriage--had to take precedence over his next career move.

“I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do that from the back of a tour bus. The hope was that we would be able to look at what we both needed and be able to come through it together. That isn’t how it ended up, and that makes everything so much more difficult.”

With his marriage ending, he resolved to devote himself to his two small children, a boy and a girl. His own childhood in Cleveland had been marked by parental absence: His mother died of a sudden illness when he was 2; his emotionally distant father died when he was 13.

“I did [musical] things here and there, but primarily I was focused on the kids and my own well-being,” Cohn said. It wasn’t an opportune time for a career break. “Marc Cohn” has sold 1.2 million copies, making it one of, if not the most successful album this decade by a new male solo artist in the traditional pop-troubadour style. But sales of “The Rainy Season,” released in 1993, slipped to 310,000, according to SoundScan, leaving Cohn at a commercial crossroads between mass-appeal and large-cult status. If executives at his record company, Atlantic, were anxious about Cohn’s long family leave, they kept it to themselves.

“To their credit, they were incredibly appropriate and gave me my space to do what I needed to do.”

Eventually, Cohn said, “I had some vague sense it would be a good thing for me to do my work, and it would be a good thing for my kids to see that I love what I do. About two years ago, I wrote “Saints Preserve Us,” “Girl of Mysterious Sorrow” and “Ellis Island,” songs I felt good about.”

At a time of family crisis, the three songs were attempts to fill voids left from Cohn’s own youth. He wrote “Ellis Island” after a private, late-night visit to the national monument in New York Harbor, where huge waves of European immigrants, including unknown relatives of his own, were processed for admittance or rejection 100 years ago.

“There was a very strong sense of identity, even spiritually, that I gained from visiting there. I was there as an invited guest, and it wasn’t long ago that relatives of mine were there under incredible duress and uncertainty.”

Only after writing and interpreting the song did Cohn realize he was also singing about his own difficult but hopeful passage.

With “Saints Preserve Us” and “Girl of Mysterious Sorrow,” he continues to work out his grief over the mother he never knew--a theme that surfaced repeatedly on “The Rainy Season” and deepens with the new songs.

Cohn said he can at least have some kind of communication with his mother through song.

“Clearly it’s a monologue, but I like to imagine it’s a dialogue,” he said. “I think I’m almost getting to a place where I’m ready to let it go. These might be the last attempts to keep the conversation going. I think she was deeply unhappy; I know that much about her. A part of me wonders whether her illness and death weren’t related to some deep emotional discomfort.”

Cohn’s new album also includes “Lost You in the Canyon” and “Valley of the Kings,” songs that envision show-biz success distorting relationships and corrupting ideals. Neither pertains to his own marriage, Cohn said. “Kings,” a parable set in ancient Egypt, where a prophet-like figure sells out, “started out almost as telling my son a fable, but it’s as much a cautionary tale for myself as it is for him.” (Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the song echoes the slide-guitar feel of Rod Stewart’s “Gasoline Alley,” a song from Rod the Mod’s long-vanished visionary days.)

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Cohn grapples most directly with his marriage in “Turn On Your Radio,” a gentle song of parting by Harry Nilsson that he recorded before he and his wife separated, but which he now sees as “a goodbye prayer.” In “Already Home,” the album’s first single, Cohn sings of seeking within himself the sense of balance and belonging that have been disrupted by external forces.

“It deals with that feeling that, ‘I’m not going to find what I’m looking for out there. Nobody out there is going to be my savior.’ It was hard to let go of that convenient delusion. Divorce wakes you up, and gladly so. Reality is a good place to have to live.”

Maybe it isn’t inevitable that experience leads to deeper art, but in Cohn’s case, that has been the result.

“A lot of what the last few years were about are things that are impossible to put into words. It didn’t impact me as an artist immediately; it just impacted me as a human being, especially as a dad. You see in your past where you weren’t as genuine or authentic as you could have been. There’s just more of me in my record because there’s more of me in my life.”

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* Marc Cohn plays tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $23.50-$25.50. (714) 496-8930.