Interview with Adam Cohen in The Sunday Times (25/9/2011)

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Born With The Gift Of A G
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Interview with Adam Cohen in The Sunday Times (25/9/2011)

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THE MINOR FALL, THE MAJOR LIFT

With a strikingly personal new album, Adam Cohen is finally ready to follow in his dad Leonard's footsteps

Rob Fitzpatrick Published: 25 September 2011


Adam Cohen is sitting in the reception area of the Spotify office, a short walk from Regent Street. He’s wearing a white shirt and jeans; a scarf hangs casually from his neck. He has a nylon-string guitar in his lap and a lived-in smile on his face. In front of him sit about 10 of the company’s employees, picking through a large lunchtime order from a local Lebanese restaurant. Cohen explains to the expectant mini throng (if Spotify employs anyone over 30 who is not quietly attractive, they’ve clearly been locked in a cupboard today) how he’s not “warmed up”, how it’s tricky going from “cold to hot”. Yet still he sings two new songs, Like a Man and What Other Guy, both of which apply a probing, diamond-sharp tip to the soft flesh of real relationships, without a hint of a waver. He looks everyone in the eye, an assured charm radiating from him.

Having just turned 39, Cohen knows it’s now or never. He knows that this new, strikingly personal album could be his last. He knows only too well that just because his father, Leonard, is one of the most famous singer-songwriters of all time, it doesn’t follow that a career in music will be any easier for him to pursue. Happily, his new record — unlike, as he’d be the first to admit, pretty much every other record he has been involved with — is one truly fit to bear the family name.

“If my music has ever been in dialogue with my father’s, only now have I had something worthy to share,” he says, tucked into one of the company’s meeting rooms. (This one’s called Sinatra.) “Forget that he’s Leonard Cohen — every son is hard-wired to want his father’s respect. For a long time, I was convinced I had signed my own artistic obituary. Now, finally, the person I really am is on a record.”

Cohen has a rare clinical eye when it comes to his own fascinating story, one rooted in dreams created by a music industry that barely exists any more. Born in Montreal in 1972, he says he “caught the music virus very early” and, as a young child, decided he would be a musician. “I saw myself as a lifetime recording artist,” he says. “There was nothing about music I didn’t love. It was the loudest call to duty, the most beautiful girl looking at me across a crowded room.”

As a teenager, he became obsessed with “poorly produced, infantile” R&B boyband records, and consumed them endlessly, hoping that he could do better. He recorded a demo with a school friend. It was picked up by the people who had signed the 1980s pop-dance act Milli Vanilli, an outfit diametric to his father. It was, Cohen says, “unmentionably bad”, and Cohen senior insisted that his son didn’t pursue it. Later, he formed a band with Stephen Stills’s son, Chris, that played endlessly and caused precisely no ripples at all.

Cohen moved to Los Angeles and made a demo for his first solo record. After a brief tussle between competing labels, he was picked up by Columbia, the label to which his father was still signed.

Cohen was presented to the press in autumn 1998. One review at the time noted that he had “commercial promise” and was “one bitter, masochistic mofo — just like dad”. A few weeks later, he met the head of his label at a party. The elder man had no idea who he was, despite having personally agreed to advance him half a million dollars. The album flopped on contact with the public.

“I was deeply misguided,” Cohen says. “My focus was on being successful, rather than artful. I’m not embarrassed about it, but I wish I’d had the courage to be more true to myself.”

The album was the first in a series of failures. A second album, “a horrific fiasco”, was begun, with Chic’s Nile Rodgers producing, but never released. Cohen formed a band called Low Millions, who released one album of literate, radio-friendly pop-rock in 2004.

It scored a few hits in Canada and Asia, but failed to sell in great numbers. Also in 2004, he recorded a French-language album called Mélancolista. Then nothing for seven years.

“I had to pick myself up after every project,” he says. “There was a lot of dis­illusionment. When I got dropped for the third time, I had white hairs in my beard and a kid on the way, and nothing was working out. I was doctoring lyrics for hopeless artists and writing raps for Adidas commercials. I was close to packing it all in.”

Over the years, Cohen says, he has repeatedly asked his father to go back and make a nylon-string guitar record, like he did in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but he has always refused. So Cohen decided to make one himself, with the resulting directness and simplicity driven by a set of rules created by the producer Patrick Leonard.

“I had to sing and play guitar at the same time,” Cohen says. “No overdubs, no click tracks. I had to be in the same room as the other musicians, and I was only allowed three takes. I retreated through my innermost door and came back with this humble offering. I thought it would be the final nail in the coffin and I would be driven out of LA for ever. Actually, it freed me. Now I have a job. I have discovered a path and I will walk down it with dignity.”

Cohen had what he calls a “poignant moment” recently. He regularly used to wake up and find his father sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear, playing a nylon-string guitar. The sight would have a profound effect on him. “It’s very powerful, very visceral,” he says. Recently, he caught his own son watching him from the couch as he sat at the kitchen table in his underwear, playing a nylon-string guitar. “There’s something satisfying about the symmetry,” he nods. “But something daunting and humiliating, too.”

You don’t want him to catch the virus, then, I say. “God, no,” Cohen laughs. “I want to make sure becoming a doctor or a chef sounds very, very exciting indeed. I fully intend to talk up all other fields of interest as much as possible.”  

Like a Man is released on October 3
"Little lady.....I AM Kris Kristofferson....."
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Re: Interview with Adam Cohen in The Sunday Times (25/9/201

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Very nice article!
Thanks "Born ..."
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mydoglorca
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Re: Interview with Adam Cohen in The Sunday Times (25/9/201

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Really looking forward to seeing him.
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