The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Revitalizing dusty tunes and rivaling Van the Man

January 2001

Singer Sonya Cohen all but disappears into the songs and arrangements on Last For­ever's Trainfare Home (Nonesuch)—Last For­ever being a collaboration between Cohen and composer-musician Dick Connette. She has a pleasing, well-bred voice and not much range; she can make her mostly traditional material new only by standing more than a few steps outside of it, wondering what the songs say, where they come from.

"John Henry," for one, here titled "Spike Driver Blues." With a song this hoary you can say there ought to be a law against any singer ever singing it again—or that every singer ought to be forced to sing it, to see if he or she can rise to the occasion. Cohen's father, John Cohen of the 1950s folk revival trio the New Lost City Ramblers, was playing "John Henry" and its several thousand cousins and aunts long before Sonya showed up in his house; you could figure she would have had enough of the stuff somewhere around 1978.

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Here the tune rides a slow, drifting arrange­ment of guitar strings and drum brushes. You can picture someone walking down a twenty-­first-century city street on a sunny day, and then, for no apparent reason, thinking of how, after the Civil War, on a mountainside, a man bet he could hammer faster than a machine and died trying to collect. Inexplicably, the idea is warming, so the song comes out neither heroic nor tragic, but cool: What a weird guy John Henry must have been to make a bet like that! The notion makes John Henry real; it masks the person thinking over his story even more so. After this, Cohen doesn't even have to cross the street to convince you, on the last track of Trainfare Home, that she has as much right as Gene Chandler to call herself the Duke of Earl. "Ay-yi-yi-yi-yiyiyiyi," she muses, not marching up the steps of the song but floating over them; the number sounds less like a top teen favorite of 1962 than a tune only a woman who's seen at least part of her way through life could begin to understand.

There's not enough of Linda Gail Lewis on You Win Again (Point Blank/Virgin), her duet al­bum with Van Morrison. She's Jerry Lee Lewis's little sister, married eight times to his seven, three times before she was sixteen—sibling ri­valry takes many forms—and she sounds as if she's daring Morrison to add to her tally. He's got a much bigger voice, and here he could al­most be afraid not to use it. Maybe that's why Lewis is always fighting her way past him.

Still, this rivalry produces a much wilder dance than the fox-trot Linda Gail and Jerry Lee essayed over thirty years ago on To­gether, where they sang with painful decorum and gentility, painting a picture of "Home Sweet Home." On You Win Again you can hear Linda Gail taking over the household—you can hear it on "Let's Talk About Us," the open­ing cut, where Linda Gail gets a whole verse to herself. Morrison is pacing the song, not matching the hot band, and then suddenly the whole feeling, the fast, hard rockabilly stomp, changes. "Ahhhhhhhhh," Lewis says, breath­ing right into the mouth of the song. You see a woman more country than Dolly Parton, more of a rocker than Corin Tucker, and nothing but contempt for either of them or anybody else. Or was that a wink?

Old and portly, his stare as implacable to­day as it was when—around the time Sonya Cohen was born—he was a Belfast soul rebel, Morrison has been knocking around lately, on record offering a Soho jazz club routine, a set of old Mose Allison songs, even a live album with a skiffle band. You could have missed The Healing Game (1997), his best record in more than twenty years, a Soho gangster's reverie; most people did. Like a man with nothing to prove, he walks all over Linda Gail, but she's seen worse; she hangs in, waiting for her moments, for bucking melodies she can ride with one hand loose when Morrison has to hold on with both.

Sonya Cohen must know the likes of "Dia­mond Joe" and "Casey Jones" so well she has nothing to prove to them. She lets the songs come to her; Lewis trees hers like pos­sums. But the two of them could be singing to each other.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, January 2001

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