Jill Cohn will be stopping in Moab on a trip from the Pacific Northwest to Colorado to share her music at Buck’s Grill House this Thursday, Sept. 19.
She will share songs from her latest CD, “Beautiful I Love You”. This is her ninth CD, but her first studio effort in five years.
Cohn’s songs pay homage to artists like Joni Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan and the Counting Crows with tunes ranging from personal reflections to musical contemplations of domestic violence and vanishing rain forests.
Raised in a small town in Eastern Washington, Cohn started singing before she started talking. She said music has always been an integral part of her journey. A full-time musician since 1999, Cohn has released nine critically-acclaimed independent releases, has gained notoriety with her songs placed in popular TV shows and continues making her live shows the centerpiece of her musical endeavors.
Cohn was a top five finalist in the Lilith Fair Talent Search and has opened for many well-known artists including Jewel and Dave Matthews.
With this latest release, “Beautiful I Love You”, she embraced her relocation from Seattle to Northern California and her partnership with Austin-based guitarist Dave Sampson. She also tapped into a vein of musical and emotional inspiration that has surprised not only her fans, but the performer herself.
“Maybe for the first time, I’ve pulled from the elements of my entire life as a recording artist,” Cohn said.
Sampson first heard Cohn’s music in 2005, when her song “Rescue Dog” played on a radio station in Northern California. He contacted her with the hope of working together.
The two began performing as a duet in late 2009, and after touring extensively with Sampson, Cohn refocused her sound and started to write songs that would fit her new performing arrangement.
“Dave’s guitar work and musical sensibilities are a rare find, and from the first moment he stepped on stage with me, I knew that we heard music the same way,” she said.
With this new musical connection, it became clear that the direction of Cohn’s songwriting would draw from both Sampson’s lush acoustic accompaniment and her life experience as a touring musician.
One big change in the prep for the latest album is the fact that Cohn workshopped most of the tunes on stage before ever setting foot in the studio.
“It was really easy to do the recording, because I knew what we were after sonically,” Cohn said. “The songs really evolved on stage, from tempo to key to lyrics. In all of my previous releases, I wound up changing them live from the way they were done on the record. This really reversed the process for me, and in a good way, I think.”
She said working with Sampson added more to her music.
“Being with someone who understood me as a musician added a whole new dimension,” Cohn said. “I think ‘Beautiful I Love You’ reflects the fact that I am definitely in a more buoyant place in my life, especially my personal life.”
