Marc Cohn learned to play guitar and was dabbling with the craft of songwriting since the cover band played everything but the kind of songs he loved so dearly. At Oberlin, Cohn taught himself to play the piano and a lasting bond formed. Soon enough, he transferred to U.C.L.A. and hit the Los Angeles coffeehouse and steakhouse circuit.

One Sunday morning in the early '70s, a youngster in Cleveland caught an earful of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and his life was never to be the same. That kid was Marc Cohn and soon after that morning, he bought everything Morrison had released to date, along with works by Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. Not long after an older brother taught him a Ray Charles tune on the piano, he joined a cover band, Doanbrook Hotel. He sang with them from junior high school until he left home for Oberlin College.

Born on July 5, 1959, Cohn was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Orphaned as a youngster, he was barely out of infancy when his mother died; his father died ten years later, when Cohn was 12. As a teenager in the 1970s Cohn was inspired by the plaintive voices of his generation, idolizing Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and especially Paul Simon, whose music, Cohn says, can bring him to tears. Cohn learned to play guitar and started writing songs when he was in junior high school, playing and singing with a local band called Doanbrook Hotel. While attending Oberlin College in Ohio he taught himself to play the piano, then after transferring to the University of California at Los Angeles began to perform in the intimate coffeehouse and steakhouse venues popular in that locale.

Releasing three albums during the 1990s, singer and songwriter Marc Cohn's emotionally stirring compositions and his easy, lilting baritone earned him a following as a musician's musician. When he first appeared on the music scene as a newcomer in the 1980s he was classified as a pop artist, although his music skirted the popular folk tradition of earlier decades, picking up neatly where the balladeers of the 1970s left off.