Paula Cole captured a Grammy award for Best New artist in 1998 when her songs “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone” and “I Don’t Wanna Wait” became enormously successful pop radio and rock hits.
But her story and path to musical success began long before that in her hometown of Rockport, Massachusetts. Born into a family that supported progressive thinking and creative exploration, her mother was a mixed media artist and an elementary school art teacher. The father was a professor of biology and ecology and played bass in a polka band.
In high school she was the president of her senior class and performed in student and staff produced theatrical productions. Later she attended Berkeley college of music in Boston, setting jazz and picking up gigs here and there singing classic jazz standards at local lounges. That later led to a recording deal from the jazz label GRP Records, but Cole turned that down. Instead, she moved to San Francisco and eventually got her first big break when she was asked to perform with Peter Gabriel on his Secret World Tour.
Cole did sign a contract with Imago Records, releasing her first album “Harbinger,” along with the single “I Am So Ordinary.” Imago, however, went out of business and there was no publicity for the album. Shortly thereafter Cole signed a contract with Warner Brothers Records, who re-released “Harbinger,” although it received a lukewarm response.
Her big break came in 1996 with her second album on Warner Brothers, “This Fire.” The album’s first single, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone” hit the number eight spot on the billboard pop charts and her signature follow-up single “I Don’t Wanna Wait” hit number 11 on Billboard and became a generational identity tune, serving as the theme song for the television series “Dawson’s Creek.”
In the years that followed Cole has released 11 other albums, had girlfriends (she came out properly in 2022), boyfriends, a husband, a daughter and later another husband who brought another child into her life. She’s still married to her husband David and openly embraces her identity as a bisexual member of the LGBTQ+ community.
There’s so much more to tell, but it’s time we get to our exclusive interview and let Paula do the talking.
David Aaron Moore: Thanks for speaking with us. Where are you on the planet right now? What’s it like where you are?
Paula Cole: (Laughs) I’m in New England. In Massachusetts, not far from where I grew up in Rockport, my hometown. Just a stone’s throw from there, in Beverly. There’s a little bit of mist outside, a soft gray color in the sky. It’s cool. It’s probably like low 70s, so it’s lovely. It feels like Ireland right now, actually.
DAM: Are you at home, or traveling?
PC: I’m in my studio. It’s like an L attachment to the building we live in, which is an old carriage house, built at the turn of the [20th] century, like approximately 1900 and it was built for horses and cows, which I love, because I’m an animal lover. And I’m standing in what was the cow shed, which now is, like, you know, renovated, and it’s got white pine on the walls. This is my room where I can close off from the house. It’s really quiet and I make music in here. I’ve got my my upright piano and my keyboards and my guitars, and I write in here. I put my ideas up on the walls, and I like to pace when I talk. So I’m standing at the door and I’m looking outside at goldfinches, because it’s starting to lean into later summer, and the goldfinches are really active. I’ve put up a lot of thistle seed feeders for them and they’re making their nests. I love looking outside at the nature, you know.
DAM: What was life like for you growing up there? I’ve read some about your parents, and it sounds like you had a great family.
PC: I did. My parents were intellectuals, and my mom’s an artist. She taught art to public school, grade schoolers, and my dad was a professor at a state college nearby at Salem State College, he taught biology and ecology. So they were educators, they were liberal. I was not raised with religion. I felt spirituality, but I didn’t have any wordage or dogma. So in a way, I was given that gift of openness and curiosity.
DAM: What are your thoughts about playing Charlotte Pride?
PC: I’m really happy and excited to do it. I’m so psyched to be there. I’ve played some Pride events, not many, and I think people are starting to understand who I am more now and that it’s a great fit. It’s love all around and it makes me happy. So it’s very natural, [but] it’s a later blossoming. I’m kind of a more reserved and shy person, so it has taken time for people to know my story, or for me to talk about my identity. I had some big hits in the late ’90s and everything was a big fuss! So then I went away for a while, and I’ve been slowly, steadily making my art again. I don’t know, I just feel like I’m entering consciousness again. It feels really nice.
DAM: What kind of stage performance can we look forward to?
PC: I know I’m gonna’ play songs that work really well in a larger festival setting. There’s one song that I want to bring out called “Hope is Everywhere,” which is like anthemic for right now and what we need. It’s like a call to action, a call to vote. It’s got an amazing beat and it’s from my double album “Revolution. And if you go to the last side D, the whole thing is this, like a 10-minute song of hope. It’s like this joyful dancing and themic rousing and it’s perfect for the festival, so I’m definitely gonna’ do that, and the hits, like “Where Have all the Cowboys Gone” and “I Don’t Wanna’ Wait.” Things that are uplifting and important. There’s a song “I Believe in Love,” that I think will be perfect. I’ll have a quartet. I’ll play piano. I probably won’t play guitar. Maybe, I don’t know, but it’s going to be uplifting. Yeah, uplifting.
DAM: A lot of people in music, literature and art have been talking about this lately, so I’d like to get your thoughts, too. How do you think AI [artificial intelligence] will impact the world? I mean for everyone, and that includes what you do, too.
PC: I don’t know what is ahead, probably massive job losses? I think it’s important for people to embrace their eccentricity and their uniqueness and their artistry, because you can’t replace that with AI. I’m sorry, but any kind of sonic replication or fabrication of music sucks. Somebody asked AI to create Kate Bush singing “Where Have all the Cowboys Gone?” It was hideous, you know, like, I’m sorry, but AI does not make good music. You know, it’s really some shit.
DAM: So you’re performing at a Pride event, and I read that you came out in 2022 and identify as bisexual. Tell us about that. Did you have any difficulty with that, or from family, friends and fans of your music?
PC: For myself, I think I did, and it felt like in my old fashioned sensibilities, you know, my Gen X sensibilities, especially growing up in a small conservative town in New England where like everything was kept really secret and private, I felt like the world only saw me as a straight person. I’m presently married to a man and I’m raising my kids, and they have such a different sense of identity. I learned a lot through them, and I learned a lot by being a teacher. I was a faculty member at Berklee College of Music for 11 years, and I was teaching millennials and Gen Z, and it was wonderful to hear their sense of identity. It made me realize the hypocrisy I was holding silently inside of myself and that I didn’t want to negate all that I am and who I’ve loved or who I’ve been with, and I’ve just kept that extremely private. I wrote about it in my songs, like in early songs, like “Carmen” on my second album, which was released in 1996. That was a love song to my girlfriend, and my core fans knew that, but I never was going about making proclamations, I just felt like raising my children and teaching younger generations. But I just couldn’t hold the hypocrisy anymore.
DAM: When you say you “couldn’t hold the hypocrisy anymore,” what does that mean? Could you elaborate on that a little more?
PC: I just live my life quietly, and people saw me as a straight person, but that’s not what I am, and I didn’t want to live the rest of my life not being honest about my identity. So yes, I’ve kind of recently, more recently, come out with that truth. It’s still new for me to talk about it. I guess, people look to me, and I teach. I need to be honest with all that I am.
DAM: Let’s talk some more about causes and issues in our world that are important to you. Your sense of awareness has always been palpable in your music.
PC: Thank you. I think the thing that keeps me up at night is worrying about our natural world, like the animals, like the innocents on the planet. What we’re wiping out. There are several species that are on the verge of extinction, and I just didn’t think we would see like this Anthropocene. We’re standing at the doorway, and we are responsible for the extinction of so many species that it’s about to happen, and I don’t see us changing as quickly as we need to change. You know, I’ve been a committed vegetarian since I was 14. I love animals, and I hope that in my like, third and fourth acts, I can be more involved with animal species preservation. Some of these species are clinging to existence, the North Atlantic Right Whale, and the Orangutan, those are some that really speak to me. I was raised by an ecology and biology professor, so I was always viewing the world in this holistic way, that we all are interdependent and symbiotic. You know, we are in relationship to each other. You start seeing the disappearance of certain species. Then the ecosystem begins to change. The food chain begins to change. It’s just a matter of time with our own demise. If you don’t respect the whole, how arrogant to think of evolution as this linear legacy that we [humans] are the be all, end all. It’s not like that. It’s it’s a spiral. It’s an interconnected circle.
DAM: What are your feelings about what’s going on in the country right now, politically?
PC: Do we need to go there? (laughs) I posted a Kamala Harris and Joe Biden photo the other day and I immediately started losing followers. It’s divisive, but I’ve always been outspoken, I’ve always been honest, wearing my heart on my sleeve, and it’s like, you’ve got to vote against fascism. I feel like we’re in Germany in the 1930s watching the birth of a dictator in slow motion right now. So it’s frightening and I don’t understand why more people aren’t educated or woke enough to see what is actually unfurling in front of our eyes right now. I guess it’s easier to stand there and rally for who you are in your indoctrinated culture, spirituality and belief systems. It’s easier to be rallying for that than looking at yourself. And you know what? What Kamala Harris represents would force a lot of people to look at themselves and their misogyny. She’s breaking barriers. So I think Trump is trying to figure out his attack line. He hasn’t figured it out yet. He’s still in a limited space as far as his wordage, but it’ll come. He won’t be able to help himself. That’s what he usually does with women or any Democrat. It’s usually crazy. That’s what it is.
DAM: So another question that I have for you, and this comes up often a lot lately, do you think that today’s world is more challenging for young, LGBTQ+ people than it was when you were in your teens or 20s?
PC: In some ways. I think the rise of fascism with the whole MAGA party is frightening. I think it’s frightening, and I think we’re going to see more scapegoating, especially of trans people and that’s frightening. There are Neo Nazis walking the streets of Nashville. There’s where drag demonstrations are outlawed. In some ways, it’s more frightening. And also the loss of women’s rights with their own agency over their bodies. I never thought I’d see that. I grew up kind of worshiping that second generation, second wave of feminism, Betty Friedan and Florence Kennedy. They made that happen for all women. It was federally protected and that’s been torn down. I think in some ways it’s worse, and we’ve got to turn this hate ship around.
DAM: As the 21st century has moved forward, the way we interact with each other has changed a lot. During the COVID pandemic, that was impacted even further. Do you think it’s more challenging for people to connect with each other now, than it was in years past?
PC: It’s hard to answer that. I think in some ways it’s easier, in some ways it’s harder. I think it might not be as positively reinforcing, and I think that human interaction is important. People are important. That’s what life is about, your experiences with other people. Our connections to people as we grow older, and throughout life, matter. If you don’t have social connection, people die from that. People die from that isolation or solitary existence. We need people. We need meaningful connection and belonging. We need each other.
Paula Cole performs at Charlotte Pride Sunday, August 18. For more details visit https://charlottepride.org/ and check out social media.
