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chuckro”Where do I put this fire, this bright red feeling? This tigerlily down my mouth, it wants to grow to twenty feet tall…”
It’s been 20 years since Paula Cole released an album called This Fire and had radio hits with “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone,” “Me,” and the insanely-overplayed theme from Dawson’s Creek “I Don’t Want to Wait.” Twenty years have not dulled in the slightest Paula Cole’s ability to fill a room with raw emotion.
There is always a certain amount of emotional impact to live performances that studio recordings just don’t have, which I’ve always loved both as a viewer and as a performer. But Paula Cole’s stage presence is a step above that: When speaking, she comes off as adorably sweet and also profoundly grateful to both the audience and her fellow musicians. When singing, she somehow blends the fiery emotions of a teenager, the vocal endurance of a twenty-year-old and the extensive skill of someone who’s made this her career for 30 years. Her charisma is astounding.
She did four of her other songs, then the entirety of This Fire. Jethrien, who admitted afterwards to only liking a couple of songs on the original album, was won over to virtually all of them after seeing them done live. That Cole ended the concert with an encore cover of “Jolene” and previously-unseen beatboxing skills was just the icing on the cake.
Trivia: Apparently This Fire was recorded in basically a day and a half, and ended up being self-produced (something that was extremely rare for female artists). Cole had originally been a jazz musician and swung into the pop/R&B/country/whatever genre by riding her fame along, which explains a lot of the jazz/jam-band tendencies of the instrumental segments of her songs. Also, she’s doing a CD of jazz/Americana covers that will be on Kickstarter at some point soon.
I hadn’t realized how much of Cole’s music was…exactly what it sounded like. I thought there was more metaphor than there is. (To be fair, I was extremely pretentious as a teenager when I absorbed this for the first time.) The bits about Bethlehem in “Tiger” are, in fact, references to Bethlehem, MA where she grew up. “I Don’t Want to Wait” is about her grandparents. The emotional cores of a lot of the songs are universal, but the lyrics are less deep poetry and more just stories about her life.
The guy sitting in front of me, who looked about my age, was clearly mouthing the words to a bunch of the songs. I’m going to guess they played an emotionally-resonant part of his youth, too. I definitely was choking up during “Hush Hush Hush.”
Overall: If you have an opportunity to see Paula Cole in concert, do it. She’s amazing.
It’s been 20 years since Paula Cole released an album called This Fire and had radio hits with “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone,” “Me,” and the insanely-overplayed theme from Dawson’s Creek “I Don’t Want to Wait.” Twenty years have not dulled in the slightest Paula Cole’s ability to fill a room with raw emotion.
There is always a certain amount of emotional impact to live performances that studio recordings just don’t have, which I’ve always loved both as a viewer and as a performer. But Paula Cole’s stage presence is a step above that: When speaking, she comes off as adorably sweet and also profoundly grateful to both the audience and her fellow musicians. When singing, she somehow blends the fiery emotions of a teenager, the vocal endurance of a twenty-year-old and the extensive skill of someone who’s made this her career for 30 years. Her charisma is astounding.
She did four of her other songs, then the entirety of This Fire. Jethrien, who admitted afterwards to only liking a couple of songs on the original album, was won over to virtually all of them after seeing them done live. That Cole ended the concert with an encore cover of “Jolene” and previously-unseen beatboxing skills was just the icing on the cake.
Trivia: Apparently This Fire was recorded in basically a day and a half, and ended up being self-produced (something that was extremely rare for female artists). Cole had originally been a jazz musician and swung into the pop/R&B/country/whatever genre by riding her fame along, which explains a lot of the jazz/jam-band tendencies of the instrumental segments of her songs. Also, she’s doing a CD of jazz/Americana covers that will be on Kickstarter at some point soon.
I hadn’t realized how much of Cole’s music was…exactly what it sounded like. I thought there was more metaphor than there is. (To be fair, I was extremely pretentious as a teenager when I absorbed this for the first time.) The bits about Bethlehem in “Tiger” are, in fact, references to Bethlehem, MA where she grew up. “I Don’t Want to Wait” is about her grandparents. The emotional cores of a lot of the songs are universal, but the lyrics are less deep poetry and more just stories about her life.
The guy sitting in front of me, who looked about my age, was clearly mouthing the words to a bunch of the songs. I’m going to guess they played an emotionally-resonant part of his youth, too. I definitely was choking up during “Hush Hush Hush.”
Overall: If you have an opportunity to see Paula Cole in concert, do it. She’s amazing.
