Dang it, I’m not getting any work done today. Adam Cohen is interviewed on his father’s legacy and their last work together.
“I remember while we were getting all of these vocals, I asked him, ‘Dad, what is it that’s causing you to, one after the other, commit such incredibly compelling vocals with relative ease?’” Adam recalls. “It’s an area in which he had often struggled, or at least he felt he’d struggled. He would rattle these readings off almost joyfully from his medical chair, which I had installed in his living room.
“And he said to me, ‘I have never found it as easy to record vocals because I’m immobilised. I can’t move. I’m in such pain, I’ve been stuck in this house for months, and I’ve been doing nothing but singing these songs.’ He was so deeply familiar with the language, with where the beat falls, where the syllables fall within the beat, he was able to, with incredible conviction, believability, character and charisma, deliver these stories completely as himself. I was amazed. Many of these vocals were essentially first takes. They were birthed almost complete. A very rare thing.”
