The singer/songwriter duo of Marc Cohn and Shawn Colvin performed Friday evening during the final night of the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the Ellen Eccles Theatre in downtown Logan (Image courtesy of Facebook).
LOGAN – The final night of the 100th anniversary celebration of the Ellen Eccles Theatre here was a breezy, relaxed evening of entertainment on Friday with renowned recording artists Marc Cohn and Shawn Colvin.
The pair are singer-songwriters and old friends. Their concert was part of the National Touring Season sponsored by the Cache Valley Center for the Arts.
Both performers are Grammy award winners with decades of experience under their belts. Colvin is by far the better vocalist of the two, but Cohn is a consummate stylist, particularly when he abandons the guitar in favor of playing the keyboard.
As songwriters are wont to do, both seemed more concerned with explaining the circumstances that led them to compose a particular tune than actually performing it. That inclination led to an evening full of self-deprecating humor and memorable music.
Their first duet of the night was a tune called “Perfect Love,” composed by Cohn in celebration of his brother’s 56th anniversary of marriage to the same woman.
Cohn quipped that if you combined his first two marriages and multiplied by two, he still wouldn’t come close to 56 years.
But Colvin complimented her fellow artist for his recent third marriage.
“Nobody can say that Marc’s a quitter,” she added.
Relating her own backstory, Colvin recalled her early days as a drunk, guitar-playing would-be songwriter living in an attic in Berkeley with a day-job as a glass-cutter. She was rescued from that fate by becoming the lead singer for a county-western band in New York City during the “Urban Cowboy” craze in the 1980s.
But giving up drinking also helped, she admitted.
Colvin brought down the house with her most famous composition, “Sonny Came Home,” which she introduced as just another break-up song.
Confidentially, she said, her longtime friend and songwriting collaborator Steve Earl called that tune a “murder ballad.”
He was right.
Cohn did a lengthy tribute to the late David Crosby, then performed “Old Soldier,” a song he wrote with Crosby in mind.
Later Cohn also dusted off his best, the soulful ballad “Walking in Memphis,” which he said was inspired by a night of rhythm and blues and gospel music in that city.
Their set ended far too soon, but the audience drew Coln and Colvin back to the Eccles’ stage for two encores, including a folk/blues version of an old Beatles tune “I’ll Be Back” and an anthem version of the Van Morrison hit “Into the Mystic.”
The final show of the CacheARTS’ 2022-23 National Touring Season will be a comedy night featuring stand-up artist Don Friesen and the comic known as B.T. on April 13.