Adam Cohen – HuffPost 4.2.12

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Adam Cohen: Advice I wish had been given to me is what I’d give, which is to say there is no consensus about what is great today. The only consensus there seems to be is that there was an era in which stuff was truly great, and that ranges from the ’60s and mid-’70s. And those people, we all agree, were great, and belong to some sort of golden era of recording, and represent a kind of truth and social consciousness and vulnerability. What those records have in common is that they were not made for format. They were not made to get onto specific radio stations. They were made by artists who were encouraged by institutions. They were made by artists who didn’t expect overnight success, but were career artists who didn’t go onto some television show hoping to be recognized overnight and sensationalized. They worked at their craft. But more importantly than anything, they were not scared to be truly themselves, and that sounds like one of those clichés that goes in one ear and out the other because it’s so overused, it’s like we squeezed the meaning out of the sentence.

But if someone had just told me, “Hey man, be yourself–don’t try to make an impressive record, don’t try to make a record where you’re going to be seductive, just really be yourself,” but who was I? I was the son of my father. I was a young man. I was, in many ways, given the opportunity to have a coming out party that I squandered by wanting to sound slick or sound big or sound this or sound that, whereas the kind of vulnerability and the denuded approach of any artists, you know the problems with their voice, the problems with pitch or the problems with their time are the true revelation of some kind of situation that they found themselves in. Those are the things that we really, really resonate with.