It's been nine years since singer-songwriter Marc Cohn's last studio album.
It's not that he shunned writing after his disappointing 1998 studio album "Burning the Daze." His life just took over:
He divorced his wife, the mother of his two older children (ages 13 and 16). He remarried — to ABC news reporter Elizabeth Vargas — and became a father again, twice.
"There's been a lot of things that have been life-intruding that made it very difficult to write," he said in a mid-November phone interview.
Then in summer 2005, he hit the road with fellow singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega for a series of small-club shows. The tour wound through Tucson in early August, and five days later, on Aug. 7, it stopped in Denver.
After that show, as he was getting in his car to leave the club, Cohn was shot in the head in a carjacking attempt.
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The injury was minor, but the trauma still haunts him.
"If I had just played another five minutes in Denver, I would never have met this guy," Cohn reflected. "I think about it all the time. I still occasionally have a nightmare about it."
The final devastation came a few weeks after the shooting, when Hurricane Katrina drowned his beloved New Orleans. For the first time in several years, Cohn had something to say.
"I just started writing because I had to," he said. "After going through what I went through — getting shot and then a few weeks later Hurricane Katrina hit. Those two events were powerful enough for me to put me in a space where I had to write. I wasn't even thinking about a record. I was just expressing myself and using songwriting as the outlet it had always been when I had something I needed to work through."
That therapeutic writing makes up the crux of "Join the Parade" (Decca), which he released in October. The disc was co-produced by noted acoustic rocker Charlie Sexton, whose production credits include Lucinda Williams and Edie Brickell.
The record has flashes of Cohn's early "Walking in Memphis" days — smoky, cool vocals and thought-provoking lyrics that spin fantastic stories of people you can see, feel, touch. He paints musical portraits in brilliant emotional swatches, melancholic on the sobering "Life Goes On," wistful on "Listening to Leavon." His voice is rich and bluesy on the New Orleans wish list "Dance Back From the Grave" and soulful on the near-gospel-tinged "Let Me Be Your Witness."
Cohn, 48, will be on the road in two-week stretches through early February promoting the record, including a stop Monday at the Fox Tucson Theatre. Early next year, the tour will take him back to Denver.
When asked if he was nervous, the 1992 Grammy winner stressed that his attack was random.
"It's like that scene in 'The World According to Garp' where Garp is being shown a new house he wants to buy," he explained. "He's not sure he likes the house or not. And then a plane comes out of the sky and crashes into the house. He looks at the Realtor and says, 'I'll take it!' What's the chance that will ever happen again? It's something like that."
Marc Cohn concert
• Presented by: Rialto Theatre and Stateside.
• When: 8 p.m. Monday.
• Where: Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St., Downtown.
• Tickets: $32 in advance, $34 the day of the show through the Fox, 547-3040
