Marc Cohn: Burning The Daze : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Marc Cohn is one of the true believers who pursued singer/songwriterdom even when the tides were against him. He hit a few years ago with 1990's "Walking in Memphis," a song that heard a yuppie paradise in Memphis-soul history. Burning the Daze, Cohn's third album, is a more conventional affair than Poltz's debut. Uneven, it alternates pleasant Van Morrison-like grooves such as the opening "Already Home" with more ponderous ones like "Girl of Mysterious Sorrow" and "Healing Hands," in which Cohn, a man unbothered by clichÄs, draws out his words and sings like Bruce Springsteen. The album's best song is "Lost You in the Canyon," a magnetic, AOR-ish rocker about a friend's descent into the unspoken terrors of Joan Didion's predatory Los Angeles. It evokes a post-Eagles, pre-Jane's Addiction time when silvery singer/songwriters added flash to the Strip. (RS 786)

JAMES HUNTER