Unconventional Cole
Closes Cain Park Season
If anyone in music has had an unconventional career, it’s Paula Cole, who performs at Cain Park on Sat 8/14. Millions of musicians try for 20-or-so years to become successful, and then quit. Cole became wildly successful almost immediately – and then quit.
Most musicians wish and hope and try for a contract with a record label and the majority don’t accomplish that. Cole was offered one right after college. And she turned it down.
The vast majority of artists who do get record deals and release records never achieve hit-record status, and most who do become successful try for many years before hitting the big time. Cole had two gigantic hit singles from her second album.
Usually artists achieve superstar status before being asked by another superstar to join them on tour and sing with them. Peter Gabriel asked Cole to become part of his performing group for his 1993 Secret World Live tour before Cole had even signed with a record label.
Some of it was luck, of which every successful musician enjoys his or her share; but most of it was Cole’s talent, plus her conviction and her passion.
Here’s the deal: Cole spent her high school years, especially her senior year, teaching herself the great American jazz standards out of a book. She spent a couple of summers at serious music camps, where she received tons of encouragement from teachers. She took weekly voice lessons from a teacher who was a jazz drummer and trumpeter, so he was able to work with her on improvisation and complicated rhythms.
“I would sit down with [the book of standards] almost every night after supper,” Cole says, “and teach myself the songs. I’d play the chord changes on the piano and lean the melodies. And often, with a lot of those songs, I never heard people sing them until after I’d learned them myself. I don’t think there was anyone else I knew in high school listening to what I was listening to. And I would literally have two-five progressions [a series of chords common in jazz] playing on a tape in my bedroom so I could vocally improvise over it. I was such a geek.”
Geek-dom triumphed, though. She was accepted into the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied jazz singing. “When I went to Berklee,” Cole says, “I was really influenced by the gospel choir there. I was one of the few white people in it. It was fantastic; it blew my head off, and it opened me up to a whole other realm. That was an important experience for me as a little white girl from a little white town in New England.
“I also started exploring rock and I finally discovering the Beatles. John Lennon is one of my all-time favorite artists. He’s one of my heroes. I love his work after the Beatles, too. Listening to the Beatles [and other artists she was discovering, like Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye] really made me start thinking about production. The Beatles were just so creative and open; they found something, a creative streak in themselves, and it was joyous.”
In her senior year at Berklee, she started writing her own songs and, she says, “they somehow landed on this person’s desk at the GRP label and he offered me a deal. I was blown away, but it just didn’t feel right. I wanted to be on a broader label; I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed in jazz.”After touring with Peter Gabriel, she did sign with a label, which went out of business after her debut album was finished. But she was picked up by Warner Brothers, which released that first album. In 1996 Warner released her self-produced album This Fire, which contained her two smash-hit singles “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” and “I Don’t Want to Wait,” the latter of which became the theme for the TV series Dawson’s Creek. Cole was nominated for seven 1997 Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year and Album of the Year, and won the Best New Artist award. She also toured with Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair. In 1999, Cole released her third album, Amen.
Her daughter was born in 2001. The child had health issues and Cole had marital problems, and the combination of those things kept her off the road and out of the studio for several years. “I wanted to get off the ‘hamster wheel,’ “she says. “I needed a pause to kind of reevaluate things.”
She was drawn back into the studio in 2007 by producer Bobby Colomby, the original and longtime drummer for Blood, Sweat and Tears, whom she had worked with years earlier. “We made the album Courage,” Cole says. “I co-wrote the songs with Bobby. It’s a gentler album. You can hear the jazz influences. It’s more eclectic. But I couldn’t get out and promote the album properly, because I was literally stuck in divorce court for two years, so it kind of went away, quickly.”
Her new album, Ithaca will be released in September. “With the new album, I was ready to write all the songs and produce again, and that’s what I needed to do. The head of Decca Records, Chris Roberts, co-produced with me. Now I’m much more solid and I can do more. And after that all that experience, the blood and tears, I’m able to talk and sing about the feelings on the new album.”
At Cain Park, Cole will perform with instrumentation she describes as “lean and muscular. I’m back to being a trio. It feels right.” Beside Cole, who plays piano on many songs, there’s Ben Whitman on drums. “He was that the New England Conservatory when I was at Berklee, and we’ve played together, off and on, since I was 19.” And there’s Ben Butler, who Cole says is “kind of genius-y on guitar. And without the bass being there, it opens up a lot of sonic space to do a lot of creative textures.”
Her personal problems seem to have subsided and her daughter’s health issues appear to have cleared up. And Cole is as serious and passionate about music as she ever was. “Music is what helps me get through it all,” she says. “I totally wouldn’t be here without the music. I’d be an insane person. Or at least a raging bitch.”
Luckily, we won’t any of experience that at Cain Park (as far as we can tell), but, instead, a lot of solid, interesting and satisfying music, and one of the best voices around.
The Paula Cole concert, the last Cain Park concert of this year, takes place in the Evans Amphitheater on Sat 8/14, at 8PM. For tickets – $20 & $25 in advance, $23 & $28 day of show – or information, contact Cain Park at 216-371-3000 or http://www.CainPark.com.
David Budin is a freelance writer and a folk and rock musician, whose folk group, Long Road, performs occasionally. He is a former editor of Northern Ohio Live and Cleveland Magazine.
His writing focuses on the arts, and especially on pop culture and pop music history. He is currently working on two pop-music-related books.