Gretta Cohn

Interviewed By: Chris DePaul

Date: 2006-04-22

Gretta Cohn has reigned as indie rock’s most visible, fearless cellist since she joined up with Saddle Creek Records (Omaha, NE) in late 2000. She transformed art/rock band Cursive, and was soon much in demand, going on to record and tour with label mates and friends, including Bright Eyes, The Faint, Rilo Kiley and Thursday. A review on Exoduster.com of Cursive’s 2003 album, The Ugly Organ, proclaimed, “the songs…are uniquely characterized by Cohn’s thundering cello lines and rhythms. As if ripping out the guts of an album, Cohn does not joke around with pretty string chords, but goes after the music as if possessed by the essence of Slayer.”

Gretta and Cursive parted ways in August 2005, and she is currently living in Brooklyn, at work on a number of new musical projects, including solo-oriented work and continued collaborations with Saddle Creek label mates. She also recently contributed several tracks to new independent film The Guatemalan Handshake. (See http://www.grettacohn.com/bio.php)

Gretta spoke to foundinthemargins about the books that have impacted her creative process and allowed her to witness times and places in the world she would not otherwise be able to know.

“I enjoy reading about history - particularly social history, and the history of New York,” says Cohn. “Luc Sante really captures a fascinating time in the history of downtown New York and its underbelly.” Luc Sante’s book Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York tells the story of New York’s lower east side, bringing to life the social and statistical history through the personal histories of criminals, prostitutes, losers, and swindlers. The histories Sante presents in this book were researched, among other sources, through old copies of Police Gazette as well as actual police, fire, and social service records.

Emma Goldman’s Living My Life is her two-volume autobiography discussing her personal and political life through 1921. Known for her anarchist writings and speeches, Goldman has been celebrated by first-wave feminists as an iconic “rebel woman” feminist. “I tend to gravitate towards travels fiction and memoirs: Emma Goldman writes with such passion for life and MFK Fisher makes me feel as though I were on her culinary adventures,” says Cohn. MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me is a chronicle of her departure from an American culinary upbringing and her new passionate adoption of a whole new way of eating, drinking and celebrating the senses. With war on the world’s horizon, Fisher recounts memorable meals across the globe shared with an assortment of fascinating characters.

“I also enjoy fantastical and more experimental fiction...I can get completely lost in a Haruki Murakami novel,” Cohn says, referring to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, a fictional adventure of a man’s bizarre encounters on his journey to find his lost wife.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is a novel set in New York, on the fault-line between the millionaires in mansions and the immigrants in apartments, promoting the age-old ideal that money cannot buy happiness.

William Faulkner’s Light in August is a story about the overlap and intersections of various characters in a town of Mississippi, presenting a depiction of the racial conflicts in the Southern United States. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy considers the nature of identity through three different men in a series of fictional stories.

“The books that I have come to love allow me to imagine experiences I haven't had or times and places that I would not know otherwise. This definitely impacts the creative process and inspires my own self-expression.”

These Artists Liked the Same Books As Gretta Cohn:

Liars
The Week That Was

Purchase Books
You can purchase the books recommended by Gretta Cohn here.

Links:
http://www.grettacohn.com