As Paula Cole returns to UK stages for the first time in over 25 years, she talks Alan Pedder through the story of her comeback and the songs that have steered her through life.
The last time Paula Cole played in London, Princess Diana had only just been buried, the UK were reigning Eurovision champions, and the Spice Girls were a dominant cultural force.
Cole has hardly been dormant in that time. There have been nine studio albums since 1996’s multi-million selling This Fire and it’s massive hit singles “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” and the Dawson’s Creek title song “I Don’t Want to Wait”, and she’s continued to tour across North America, rarely venturing further afield. But, as Cole tells me over a video call from her New England home, her love for the UK remains undimmed. It started at a young age, too, during a summer spent travelling around England, Scotland and Wales with her family. “It was the rainiest summer of the century, so of course we were camping in that,” she says, laughing. “But we loved it so much. At the end of the trip we found this heart-shaped stone, wrote ‘We hereby bury our hearts in England’ on it, and put it in the ground.”
Cole’s partner of 17 years was born in London and raised in Ireland, so she has made regular trips back here. “I want to spend more time over there in my life, going forward,” she says. “I’ve been asking my management to get me back for shows and, for years, it always seemed like one thing after another kept happening and I wasn’t able to make it. I’m really thrilled that it’s finally happening at long, long last." Cole plays London's Union Chapel tonight, and at The Long Road Festival in Leicestershire over the weekend.
One reason for the turning of the tide is the slow-burning success of her latest album, Lo, released in March this year. To Cole’s mind, it’s her most authentic version of herself, inspired by overcoming her fear of re-entering the spotlight and the psychological roadblocks of post-traumatic stress. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t nervous to release it. “I put it on the backburner after it was recorded, where it languished for a while,” she explains. “It’s a very vulnerable feeling to release these messages and these lyrics out into the world, and to get back to my autobiographical process. I needed to build this other catalogue of albums that reflect the fullness of who I am as an artist, and how cross-genre that is, but I think people are just really happy to have the really personal stuff back.”
There’s an argument to be made that Cole’s banner singles were so big that they’ve overshadowed her other accomplishments. Who remembers that Cole was the first ever woman to be nominated at the Grammys as a sole producer? Or that, long before Taylor’s Versions, she called out her exploitative ‘sharecropper’ label contract from the ‘90s and re-recorded those two big hits? “Signing that deal is something that my soul will seek redemption for until I die,” she says, firmly. “Copyrights last for 50 years post-mortem, and I wasn’t seeing any royalties for those recordings. I want to be able to leave something for my kids.”
Cole re-recorded “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” and “I Don’t Want to Wait” back in 2016, and, in an unexpected twist, the Dawson’s Creek theme is finding a whole new audience among Gen Z. The TV show may have aged like milk, but there’s something quite timeless about Cole’s soaring dedication to seizing the moment.
Appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show earlier this summer, Cole is clearly enjoying her viral moment, but, as always, she wants to carry a message. “The Grammys still haven’t awarded a woman for Best Producer on her own," she tells me. "That achievement is still languishing. But I’m glad that I spoke up in the ‘90s about some of the injustices I saw. I’ve had to fight so much, and I hope that has helped others to have an easier time of it. At the same time, I am getting tired of the fight to be heard. I want to people to see me and regard all of who I am.”
In choosing her Nine Songs, Cole goes into detail about her most formative experiences with music, her undying love for the women who lit up her path, and her wish for more people to speak out about inequalities and the climate peril that’s a gathering storm.
"Annie's Song" by John Denver
PAULA COLE: I was raised in Rockport, Massachusetts in the ‘70s, on the tip of the island of Cape Ann, off the North Shore. The hip FM radio stations didn't come into our remote location, so I was left to my devices of making music with my highly musical family. It was a unique childhood experience. My Dad played many instruments and worked weekends playing bass in a polka band. He would play standards on the piano, folk songs on the guitar, upright bass, harmonica, banjo, even hambone – just everything, across every genre. I thought it was perfectly normal for families to break out into three-part harmonies at the drop of a hat.
My parents' record collection consisted of very little but there were a few albums that spoke to me, and one of those was John Denver’s Back Home Again. I learned all the songs from it, but my favourite was "Annie's Song". I think it’s inherently beautiful. It touches my innocence, my childhood. I don’t think John Denver received his proper dues as a songwriter. He wrote earnest classics, touching the good in us all, weaving nature and spirituality, and he spoke to my 7-year-old self.
One of the first songs I wrote, aged 8, was called "God May Take the Earth". Although I was raised by atheists, I was searching for the meaning of my life, asking existential questions, and the song was influenced by listening to John.
BEST FIT: Almost 50 years later, would you say that you’re still searching for the meaning of life?
Well, absolutely. However, I do feel closer to some answers. I don't necessarily know the answers. Personally, I feel like it’s a lifetime’s work to learn to let go of trauma and allow forgiveness – and I mean true forgiveness, the kind that makes it so that you don't feel affected by your pain anymore. I want to leave behind great art and love that continues on, whether it’s love that I’ve invested in my personal relationships or in my music. So, of course, I’m still asking those existential questions.
John Denver wrote this song for his then wife, Annie Martell, apparently in just 10 minutes while sitting on a ski lift. What’s the strangest place that you’ve written a song?
Oh, so he wrote that looking at the mountains that he loved and being in that dreamy art space? That’s so cool. I didn’t know that. Hmm, the strangest place… well, there’s a song called “Mississippi” from my album This Fire, and that one came to me like a lightning bolt while I was in Mexico at a retreat. I remember I was reaching my hand into a closet and then, boom!, it came to me. I just felt it, you know?
You described “Annie’s Song” as “inherently beautiful” a moment ago. Can you expand on that a bit?
Well, it’s the melody. I love melody. Like, I would take Joni Mitchell over Bob Dylan any day, because there’s so much melody to her work. That’s a hard thing for me to say, because I adore Bob Dylan, but you catch my drift. I’d say that I’m also highly influenced by the great songwriters of the mid and early 20th century, when everything was about melody. For me, a good melody is one you can sing even if you don’t have the chordal accompaniment. A good melody is one that arcs and moves. But I also love melodies that are kind of journalistic, almost. Pointillistic, and kind of staccato.
I think the melody of “Annie’s Song” is incredible. It’s has a 12/8 feel to it, which, again, I love. It’s a bit of an unsual meter. I also love the way he weaves nature into the lyrics, which he always did. Yeah, it’s a simple song. It’s kind of innocent. People make fun of John Denver, but I do love his music and feel like he needs a little redemption.
Courtney Love recently said she didn’t like Lana Del Rey anymore because she covered a John Denver song, which seems a little harsh.
I do love Courtney, and I love a lot of Lana Del Rey’s music. I think that speaking badly about other artists is… I don’t know. Let’s just focus on the good.
When I was researching for this piece, I realised that John’s plane crash happened just two days before the release of “I Don’t Want to Wait”. What do you remember of that week?
I remember I was in Colorado and seeing it in the newspapers and all over. I actually thought of that not long ago, because I happened to be in Ireland when Sinéad O’Connor died, and the news was just everywhere.
John’s death really did hit me. Like I said, my family did not have many albums. It was a very desolate culture in our home, as far as popular music from the outside world was concerned. Inside, we made our own music. It was kind of a quirky environment. Rich, musically, but I did not have any of the usual cultural references when I left home. I had a lot of catching up to do. I didn’t even really hear The Beatles until my 20s. But we did have that one John Denver record.
I don’t know why the critics were so mean to him, but she still managed to sell out shows wherever he went. He had women literally throwing their underwear up on stage, you know? He sang like an angel with his high tenor voice, he could play all the instruments, and he had kind of a twinkle in his eye and a sparkle in his soul. Maybe they were mean to him because he did a lot of soul searching in his music, but I appreciate that searching and I appreciate his using nature as a metaphor. I do that a lot myself.
"Black Coffee" by Peggy Lee
PAULA COLE: Fresh out of high school, I went off to Berklee College of Music in 1986, intent on being a jazz singer. I wanted to improvise over the chord changes and be a female Chet Baker. But, life happened. I found myself crying every day. I went into therapy, started writing, and my intention didn't quite evolve the way I had originally thought. My songs weren’t jazz, they were me.
But while I was deep in the American songbook of standards and listening to the greats, I came across Peggy Lee's version of this beautiful song by Sonny Burke and Paul Francis Webster. I love her damage, her breath, and the sadness and knowing sparkle in her voice. And I love the sparseness of this particular studio recording. Similar to "Fever", she keeps things conversational with mostly just an upright bass. Peggy loved space in the music, as did Miles Davis. They understood the power of silence and simplicity.
I love this song, but I am also repulsed by this song. It's the bridge. When I was in college, I was working a lot in clubs and lounges as a jazz singer, and I really struggled to sing the bridge of “Black Coffee”. The words felt like they belonged to some sexist science fiction from Mars, or something. I did not relate, and I did not want to relate. I was not some woman in a kitchen born to weep and fret, hell no.
So, this song – written by men, of course – was pivotal to me because it made me realise that I didn't want to be a mouthpiece for others' thoughts. Especially for men from another era, perpetuating ill-fitting stereotypes. I wanted to sing and write my personal truths that would elevate my life, and hopefully the lives of other women. I began relating much more to the songs of Tracy Chapman, Kate Bush, Suzanne Vega, Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell. As much as I adored jazz, and always will adore jazz, this song catapulted me toward my autobiographical process of writing out my life.
I was really moved by Rickie Lee Jones’s album Pirates, and it really made me think about songwriting. She played a lot of unusual chords that attracted my ears, and her lyrics were poetry – sometimes written in the third person, sometimes personal. I just loved and admired her artistry. I felt she was so unique. I felt the same, as well, about Annie Lennox, because of her androgyny and her rich, beautiful voice. And when I think about Suzanne Vega’s first album, Tracy Chapman’s first album, and Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love… every one of those albums just electrified me. They woke me up and showed me the way, and that’s how I abandoned my path to being a jazz singer and embraced the path I’ve been on since.
"The Man with the Child in His Eyes" by Kate Bush
BEST FIT: Hounds of Love is full of classics, but the Kate Bush song you’ve chosen here comes from her debut album, The Kick Inside, from 1978. It’s a song she wrote at the age of 14, which seems crazy, and apparently the original lyrics were written in hot pink marker pen.
PAULA COLE: Oh wow. I mean, is there anything more godly than this song? I love that she wrote it as a teenager, directly connected to her muse and unfettered by the world. It is so pure, and you can hear that she trusts herself completely. It is utmost beauty.
When I found Hounds of Love in the late ‘80s in America, I wondered, “What is this, 'Produced by Kate'?" I remember being amazed that she was the only female artist who was self-producing, or at least until I found Anita Baker – I can count on one hand how many women were doing that then. I loved that Kate wrote her life, that she sang and played her songs in her own way, and that she had her hands all over that console. I could just feel it. The sound was so unique. Especially at that time in pop music, when producers were kings. A producer's sound often was a laminate applied over the artist. You could hear the producer's sound, but I wanted to hear the artist.
I do feel like England helps to foster its geniuses and its eccentrics more, I think, than American culture does. It’s tough, being in popular music, and as a woman, because in America it feels like there’s always a laminate over you, and a way that other people think you should be seen. I feel like there’s no laminate with Kate. It’s all Kate, and there’s nothing quite as unique as that in the whole world. She’s made her own stamp. Listening to Hounds of Love, it was entirely refreshing to hear such different thoughts. Her production was wild and brave, as was her writing and her entire vision, and that intrigued me deeply.
I mean, who else could write from the first-person perspective of a foetus, like Kate does in “Breathing”? Who else has the imagination to do that? Only her. And then there’s the apocalypse around the mother. That’s so imaginative, so mad, so brilliant. She’s also so melodically adventurous and so adventurous as a producer. She brings in so many influences and music from different parts of the world, like the Irish musicians and the Bulgarian women’s choir. Her music is so diverse. I cannot tell you how often I've played her music and how much I dearly love this woman.
I love her quiet thoughtfulness when she speaks in interviews. I love her shyness, and I love that she keeps her privacy, too. I feel better and safer in the world just knowing that Kate Bush is in it. I thanked her when I won my Grammy. I felt a similar way about Sinéad as well. I felt safer in the world knowing that there was someone who could be so outspoken about things that I also felt passionately about, but was too shy and less courageous. I felt protected by Sinéad, in a way, because she was a louder voice. So, yeah, I just feel safer knowing that Kate is still there, kind of holding up the entire tent.
I remember when I first listened to Hounds of Love all the way through, and my jaw just about hit the floor. Do you remember how you felt when you heard it for the first time?
Well, I remember I was in high school, in an art class, when I heard Kate coming through the radio. The art class was a place where people who sort of didn’t fit in would go, and, even though I was respected because I was class president for three years of high school – which I still don’t understand – I would often go there to seek solace and just draw. The art class was also one of the few places in school where they would play music. I think the first song I head must have been “Running Up That Hill”, and that’s what put her on my radar because it was just so different to anything else I had heard up to then.
When I went to college, I bought Hounds of Love on cassette, and that’s when I really did the deep dive. I have to say, it’s "The Ninth Wave" for me. I refer to it as a Nicaea suite, which is a dark journey of the soul. I would make my students at Berklee College of Music listen to "The Ninth Wave" and then ask the to compose their own Nicaea suite, with varying pieces of music that would seamlessly flow into each other. They would have to create segues and play with different tempos and fields, and then have to unify it all in terms of making it this kind of journey.
It actually means so much to me that, before her 2014 concerts and long before Stranger Things, I was telling millennials and Gen Z kids about her. I feel it’s important that we keep advocating for those brilliant artists who might have gone quiet for some years but have all this meaningful work behind them.
In 1979, Kate gave an interview where she talked about the meaning of the title “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” being that a lot of men are just big kids in adult bodies. She seemed quite charmed by that at the time, worrying that women had to grow up more and be more responsible. Do you feel like you need to keep nurturing your own inner child?
Wow, these questions are so beautiful, thank you. How do I keep in touch with my own inner child? How do I foster and care for it? Wow. Well, I’ve had to be responsible and sort of pulling myself up by my bootstraps for some years now. A lot of fighting, just with bad record deals and then a bad marriage and being a divorced and single mom, as well as trying to fight to just be heard in the world.
These days, as my kids are at the age where they are graduating college, I do feel a least some psychic relief knowing that they are adults. Lo is being heard by more people, and that brings some joy and also relief. I find myself in a gentler space and able to be in a beginner's mindset a little more. Like, I’ve played guitar for a long time but mostly in alternative tunings and largely playing with my thumbs, but now I have finally, for the first time, really committed to start playing in traditional tunings. I used to get so frustrated with it because I have some motor skill limitation in my left hand. I knew I had the music inside of me, but it just would not come out. These days I’m able to remain gentle with that child self, and so, even though I’m not great at playing in that style, even just the process of allowing myself to learn something new is, in a way, taking care of my younger self.
I haven’t really had the luxury of being able to foster the child in me, but now I’m in a softer place I can finally stop fighting by hard. I also went back to therapy, just in this past year, and I’ve been amazed by how helpful it is. I’m amazed at all the hard things I’ve been through and how dismissive I’ve been of them just because I’ve had to soldier on. So I’m catching up with myself, and the child inside me, now.
That’s really nice to hear. How long had it been since you were last in therapy?
I went briefly during my divorce, so that would have been 2006, 2007, and thereabouts. But that time wasn’t about addressing things, that was just getting me through. It was just survival. I had been in therapy once before then, when I was in college, so this is my third time. I really do think it helped me to find the courage to write more vulnerably and to release those songs on Lo.
"Alfie" by Burt Bacharach and Hal David
PAULA COLE: I had the honour of working with Burt Bacharach a few times. I asked him what his favourite song of his was and he replied "Alfie", and then he performed it for me, solo, with piano. I think it’s one of the most adventurous and gorgeous melodies ever composed, and it’s difficult to sing. One needs fantastic pitch to nail the bullseye of those bridge notes.
Even though it was composed for a movie – one I've never seen and probably never will see – and although I don't know who ‘Alfie’ is, I find myself engaged in the existential questions of life in the lyrics, while being transported to the moon by the compositional arc of the melody. "Without true love we just exist." It's as simple and as profound as that.
BEST FIT: I think the movie is best skipped. It’s hard to stomach all the sexism and outright misogyny. I think a lot of Burt Bacharach and Hal David songs belong in the same category as “Black Coffee” – I mean, have you heard “Wives & Lovers”? It’s sometimes hard to reconcile that with how great they are melodically.
I know! Every other bar is an odd meter, but you’d never know it because it’s so damn singable. The melodies are genius.
I’m guessing you probably didn’t have access to any Bacharach records growing up. How old were you when you got into his music?
Oh, well, I was probably in my early forties when I properly did a deep dive into his songs. My alma mater Berklee had asked me to come back as a guest to perform at a ceremony honouring Burt Bacharach, who was receiving an honorary doctorate there. I had to sing his songs in front of him, which of course was a lot of pressure. I listened a lot to versions of Bacharach songs like “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “Alfie”, “Walk On By” and “The Look of Love” – by artists like Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield – and it was so incredible to deep dive into this music.
I had actually met Burt once before then, in 2005, when I was singing with Chris Botti for a live, filmed concert of his. Both Burt and I were involved, and we sang “The Look of Love” at that show. So, although I had met him before, I don’t really know what compelled me to ask him backstage at the Berklee ceremony what his favourite song was. I’m glad he said “Alfie” because it really is such an interesting song. When you try to sing that melody, you are really surfing some complex waves. People talk about “The Star-Spangled Banner” being a difficult melody to sing, but I don’t think so at all. But “Alfie”? That’s a difficult night. That’s some shit. That’s precipitous mountain climbing there.
How did he even come up with that? Like, how does a human come up with a melody like that? It’s still so beautiful, even though it’s difficult. And then there’s the lyric, which comes back to the idea of love being the true meaning of life, which is something so uncomplicated and simple. Yeah, it’s kind of a strange song, and yet it’s a classic.
"Troy" by Sinéad O'Connor
BEST FIT: Let’s dig deeper into your love for Sinéad O’Connor with this pick. When did you first hear The Lion & The Cobra and what was it about her music that drew you in?
PAULA COLE: It would have been in the late ‘80s some time. When did the album come out? 1987? I was at college then, and people were excitedly talking about it. I heard her voice and it sent shivers down my spine. There was no instrument on Earth – nothing – like that voice. I immediately went out and bought the album. I went to see the Lion & The Cobra tour at the Boston Orpheum and Sinéad came out wearing some kind of monk-like robe. Her voice had so much sorrow and pain and wisdom and rebellion, and she would oscillate between strength and vulnerability, going from the most fragile moments to the most electrifyingly powerful ones. I loved that, and I related to it.
I loved the way that she defied her record company by shaving off her hair. She rejected their impetus to laminate over her. A lot of record companies want you to present in a certain way. They want you to be sexy or to look a certain way on a record cover. I had difficulties with my first record label trying to come up with a cover image for Harbinger. I didn’t even want to be on the cover but the president of the label, Terry Ellis – who was the guy who signed Blondie and Pat Benatar to Chrysalis Records – had different ideas. We went through six expensive photo shoots and kept disagreeing on all of them, to the point that I just cut off my hair. I didn’t shave it, but it’s pretty damn short on the cover we ended up using, and Sinéad was my inspiration for that.
As I said earlier, I just felt safer knowing that Sinéad O’Connor was in the world, pressing on its boundaries. I’ve always passionately loved her. She made me feel more free, she helped me in that way. And her art was so masterful – her voice, her vision. When I found out about her death, in Ireland, I spent the whole day just driving around listening to her music. Sinéad was too sensitive for this world and too fiercely honest for the patriarchy to stomach, and she illuminated the way for me and all women. I’m so, so sorry she’s gone.
Have you listened to her final single? It’s a cover of the traditional song “Trouble of the World”, which I only knew previously from Mahalia Jackson. It was put out for Record Store Day so it kinda flew under the radar a bit, but it’s stunning. And, as it turns out, prophetic in a way. I was absolutely floored by it.
I haven’t! Oh my god. I just got shivers up my spine. Okay, I’m writing that down and I’m going to listen to it right after this.
Let’s get on with discussing “Troy” then. What is it that you love about this song?
Well, what can I say? It’s just an epic masterpiece. I’ve always loved it, but when I learned from the recent documentary Nothing Compares that “Troy” is about her relationship with her mother, I was wrecked. Speechless.
Sinéad apparently refused to play this song live for 20 years, from 1988 to 2008, presumably because there was so much emotional weight attached to it. Have you ever found that one of your songs became to heavy to sing?
I think I still have some in me that I need to write, and that I probably couldn’t write until my parents have left the planet. I’ll be totally honest. There’s a song called “Life Goes On”, which is the first track on my Raven album, which touches a little bit on the vitriol I experienced from my father. I wrote that song in the late ‘90s but I waited 15 years to put it out. I went on a walk with my dad and he told me, “You know, Paula, you are free. Go ahead and release it. I hope it’s a big hit,” and that really helped. I needed to know it was okay with him first before I put it out.
Part of that is because when I released Harbinger in 1994, the first song on it, called “Happy Home”, is one in which I talked about my family. In a pretty innocuous way, I think, but it hit my mother very hard. We had trouble talking for a while after that song came out. It was damaging to us, but I think, ultimately, it made our relationship more authentic. But, still, that experience does make me pause on some things. I have so much to say about my past with them but I can’t totally let it all out yet. I can only hint at it. But it’ll probably all come out in a memoir someday. I need to get started though, because writing that is gonna take years.
"(I'll Never Be Your) Maggie May" by Suzanne Vega
PAULA COLE: Suzanne Vega’s heartbreakingly beautiful divorce album Songs in Red & Gray is my favourite album of hers. Even though her debut eponymous album was the most influential to me personally, this album's melodicism touches my pain emotionally. I especially love the simplicity and depth of "(I'll Never Be Your) Maggie May": "And so a woman leaves a man..." I love that perspective. We are outside of our bodies. We watch ourselves pick ourselves up from the rubble in a detached third person perspective as we move on. I was in the middle of my first marriage considering doing the same, and so I'll always feel a closeness to this song.
I was living in Los Angeles at the time. I heard this song being played on the radio, and that’s when I realised she had new music out and that it was clearly a divorce album. I was glad for her that she was getting her power back, in a sense, by writing these healing songs. She’s a brilliant writer and a good person. She was supportive to me in my early days. I met her in New York, and she had me over to her apartment and was kind and generous to me in ways that a lot of women hadn’t been. I felt like I was sort of alone in a world of men in the music business, so it was just so wonderful to meet her.
Later, we were both on the Lilith Fair tour, and now she plays all the time with Gerry Leonard, who played on Harbinger. That’s actually partly why he moved to the United States from Ireland, when he was in my band. So, Suzanne and I have some commonalities. I care about her and I’m grateful for her. As I said earlier, her early work showed me a path of what I could do. I saw her play a solo show at a venue called The Speakeasy in downtown New York, around the time that was bursting out with that first album, and it showed me a way forward.
Here was a woman writing her own songs, songs that were autobiographical and poetic, and there really wasn’t a lot of them at the time. Annie Lennox, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Joan Armatrading – who I also love – but there’s a lot of years and distance between those people.
BEST FIT: The song you’ve chosen is so cleverly written in so many ways. I love the way she has twisted and reimagined some of the imagery from the original “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart.
Yes, she’s so clever. She’s such a thinker and it’s beautiful. I mean, “Marlene on the Wall”? Incredible, just incredible thoughts.
After I heard this song coming through the radio, I immediately went out and bought the Songs in Red & Gray album, and I love it. I love the songs, the production. As I said, I was in a reflective place because my own marriage was just horrible. I wanted to get out and I didn’t know how, but I knew that it was up to me. And, once again, Suzanne was there, shining a light on my life in some way through her music. I’ve never told her that. I should thank her. I really should. We haven’t kept up, but I think it would be pretty easy for me to cross her path because we have a lot of common friends.
That’s Jay Bellerose playing drums on that track, by the way. Jay and I met at Berklee when I was 19. We were both students there, and he became my drummer and has been a massively profound influence on me. He’s playing a little toy snare on that track and it’s just beautiful.
"God" by John Lennon
PAULA COLE: I don’t know how I came across John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, which was the first album he made after leaving the Beatles, entering primal scream therapy, and deepening his mother/lover/soul-connection to Yoko Ono, but I do know that he created a masterpiece.
I’ve watched some documentaries on the making of the album and, I have to say, I’m so glad that Phil Spector didn’t show up to the studio sessions to produce it. In fact, John’s manager took out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine asking Phil Spector to show up for work, but he rarely did. John produced most of it himself, essentially accomplishing final mixes after each tracking session, while the magic was still fresh. And it’s so stark. It’s mostly just a rhythm section, though you do have Billy Preston playing the grand piano on “God” while John plays a rinky-dink upright.
The songs on Plastic Ono Band are electrifying to me. I love the space in the music. It’s really raw, and you really hear the skeleton of the song. You really hear John’s vocal. He was one of the brave writers who sings out their autobiography. John didn’t want to turn 30 and be singing things like “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. He wanted to turn 30 making meaningful solo work, and so he did. He turned 30 while making this album and fulfilling his aspiration, living out loud and bravely. I mean, leaving The Beatles is crazy and brave, and then to be publicly talking about things like transcendental meditation and primal scream therapy and connecting to past trauma… that’s brave, too.
Plastic Ono Band is so much about his mother wound. There’s a grim bell toll that opens the record, and then “mother” is the first word. John felt doubly abandoned by his mother, because she’d left him to be raised by his auntie and then was killed by a drunk policeman. He lost her twice, and he was so wounded by that. Yoko filled a lot of holes for him, I think, and he was happy to be #2 with her as #1. John tried many modalities of healing and transcendence and ultimately arrived at himself: "Yoko and me – that's reality."
I love Plastic Ono Band so dearly. It’s one of my favourite albums of my life and has been profoundly influential to me. There’s so much self-discovery in it. You can hear him finding his way through all of this profound mess. It’s so brave. I think it’s starkly courageous to write out one’s beliefs in a list like he does in “God”.
BEST FIT: Right? Because who else was writing this kind of stuff? “I don’t believe in Bible / I don’t believe in Tarot / I don’t believe in Hitler / I don’t believe in Jesus,” and so on.
And then he ends the list with “I don’t believe in The Beatles,” which is so interesting. People had deified The Beatles. They were up there with Jesus Christ, as he said. So, on this song, he’s tearing out all of these idols and it’s beautiful.
John was a flawed man. He was vitriolic. There’s some shame in his past, for sure, including abuse to women, and my love for him doesn’t condone that at all. I mean, we are all flawed. We all make horrible mistakes, and John was very wounded. He was trying to be a better man. I really believe that, especially closer to his death when he was a dad at home, baking bread and recording home demos into his little reel-to-reel mono recorder. He was in a softer space after Sean was born, and it’s beautiful to see that arc. I feel really sad that we never got to hear the music he would have made decades later.
It's been so interesting to see what Yoko has gone on to do in her life. What a fascinating person. I saw her live once and it blew me away. It was actually at a show you would have loved, curated by Patti Smith. Yoko was performing, along with Patti, Sinéad, Tori Amos, Kristin Hersh, Beth Orton and others. Yoko came across a total force of nature.
Wow, that sounds amazing and so beautiful. I have to say, again, I feel freer and safer in this world because Patti Smith is in it. I did a fundraising show in 1998 that Patti Smith was on, and because I was such a profoundly late bloomer, I had never listened to her music at that time. I still feel like I haven’t totally caught up, but I love her so much. She shocked me at that show, with the way she performed, and the way she spat on the stage. My New England sensibilities were shaken, and it was fantastic!
“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” by Marvin Gaye
PAULA COLE: I don’t remember when I first heard Marvin Gaye’s “What's Going On”, which was the ubiquitous single, but when I listened to the What’s Going On album in its entirety for the first time, and really contemplated his vision as a whole, I felt like I really understood it and it touched me deeply.
When I was making my Amen album, I thought a lot about Marvin Gaye, and I even thanked him in the liner notes. Firstly, because of his bravery in making a subtle political statement that is largely across the whole of What’s Going On; and secondly, because he had to go against the whole culture of Motown Records to make it. Motown hated that record. They wanted him to keep singing love songs, duets and prefabricated hit songs, but Marvin didn’t want that. He wanted to talk about what was going on around him, which was the Vietnam War, environmental disaster and racial upheaval. He wanted to make an artistic statement, just like Otis Redding did before he died. You know, a lot of the people around Otis – his wife and people from his label – didn’t like “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”, which was influenced by The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. So, like Marvin, he had to fight against the culture and expectation, and against the laminate they wanted him under. I love that they both stayed true to themselves and made artistic statements that were authentic.
What’s Going On was visionary. It’s a whole oeuvre. If you listen to the way that James Jameson is playing the bass, it almost feels like Brazilian music to me, like it’s very precise footwork. The bottom end of the groove is so deft. And I love Marvin’s singing on it. He’s an incredibly rhythmic singer. It’s like a dance, and that makes trying to sing his melodies – like the one on “Mercy, Mercy Me” – quite difficult. I’m getting technical here, but you don’t sing that melody straight. It doesn’t land on a one or a two or a three or a four. It lands on the 16th notes. The anticipation! You have to have such good internal rhythm to sing the melody the way he sings it.
Recording my own version of this song got me inside his head, in a sense. It was difficult to sing, because it has this deeply rhythmic, very finessed African influence, but it also felt totally natural and I could understand where he was coming from. That’s what makes Marvin Gaye one of the greatest singers of all time: his rhythmic sensibilities. The same goes for Michael Jackson. They were both livewires of rhythm. But I digress… Can we please have more songs about the environment? Can more artists stand up and be brave like Marvin Gaye or Bob Marley? Pablo Picasso said, "Artists are the politicians of the future,” and I think that taking on the mantle of the sociopolitical is what delineates artists from entertainers. I think every artist should do it at least once in their career, otherwise to my mind they’re not really an artist. I know that’s kind of harsh to say, but we have an enormous responsibility.
We talked a bit about my love of nature earlier when we were talking about John Denver, and part of that comes from growing up with my father, who was an ecology and biology professor, and an ornithologist. He would play these Roger Tory Peterson birdcall tapes at home, and I would hear that all the time. He was learning how to identify birds aurally, and he took me on a lot of hiking and camping trips in my youth, like I was the son he longed for. He was an Eagle Scout. He loved the outdoors, and I grew up sharing his reverence for it, so it makes sense that I would bring so much nature and symbolism of nature into my work. Listening to Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me”, I was just so happy to hear someone singing about the planet in a sociopolitical way.
I love how each track on What’s Going On segues, with overdubs of horns and strings blending and blurring song into song. Those overdubs were all recorded in a single session, and without them it would be a very different kind of album. There’s an art to segues, and when they are done well they are compositions in and of themselves, and they add something a little strange, otherworldly and poetic to this particular record. It’s an incredible work of art.
BEST FIT: You made a call just now for more songs about environmental and other sociopolitical issues. Is there anyone out there who you think is doing a good job of speaking to some of these issues in their music?
Alison Russell comes to mind as somebody who’s expanding the conversation in many ways, including about identity. Here she is, a Black woman who identifies as bisexual, is married to a Caucasian man, and is always speaking out about causes she believes in, and I love her for that. I think she’s the best example I can think of.
“God Bless the Child” by Billie Holiday
BEST FIT: You covered this song on your 2017 album Ballads, but I imagine that you must have performed it a lot back in your jazz singer days.
PAULA COLE: Yes, right, that one was in my book. When I was performing at the jazz clubs and at the Boston Airport Hilton Lounge on Thursday nights with Al Vega, that was one I’d often sing.
So, by the time you got around to recording it, was it like putting on like a familiar pair of shoes? Or did you try to approach it in a different way?
The melody was absolutely familiar. I can play it on piano and learned all the chord changes, so, when I sing it, I can really be very deeply inside the melody and sometimes hit alternative notes.
When I was recording Ballads, I had my beautiful guitar player Chris Bruce with me in the studio. If you don’t know him, he plays a lot with Meshell Ndegeocello and is very loyal to her and is an important part of her sound, and he’s a brilliant producer in his own way. I really trust him musically, and we’ve been playing together for 20 years. Anyway, when we were recording he picked up this little black koa guitar, which is a very old American guitar made of koa wood, from the earlier part of the 20th century. It has such a magical sound, this ancient little thing, and in using that he laid fresh groundwork for the entire track. I credit him for that, and for making it into a different kind of ballad, with a different feel. It was spontaneous and so beautiful that I knew it needed to be track one of the record.
What is it about this song that speaks to you in particular?
Well, I guess part of it is that I’m identifying a lot with artists who come from difficult circumstances, and Billie Holiday had an extraordinarily difficult life. I mean, she was raised in a brothel in Harlem, where her mother worked, not only in the bedroom but on her hands and knees washing floors, too. Lord knows what happened to this little girl being raised there. You can only imagine.
She was so sensitive, and I think she heard music in a different way from other people. There’s some video footage of her singing in a TV studio session with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and there is such a beautiful friendship between Lester and Billie in those moments. You can see it in their eyes. When she sings and he plays, the way they look at each other is just with so much love. I think it was Billie’s decision to make her art so personal that made her different from all the other jazz singers. She was living her life, she was thinking out her life, and she wrote out her life. Most of the other jazz singers of the time were singing, you know, songs from musicals or songs written for them, usually by two white men. This song is by Billie Holiday, and that in itself is a rarity.
There are few female composers in the 20th century American songbook of standards, and Billie is one of them. Her lyrics are in her voice and in her vernacular. I love that, in “God Bless the Child”, she takes some line that she picked up somewhere in her life – “god bless the child that’s got his own” – and forever immortalised it in a way that I think we can all relate to. We can feel good about ourselves when we pick ourselves up from our own pain and we make our own path. Writing out her life was what delineated her, and it’s what has given us a greater understanding and a bigger window into her experience, and the experience of what it was like to be a woman in jazz in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.
I love her for making it through the horrific circumstances of her life the best she could and writing something so timeless out of it. I love that, today, I can sit down with the piano and just crawl inside her head. I think that’s incredible. This song is so beloved and meaningful to me. Not only is it perfect, it symbolises redemption for Billie, and for all women.
I always loved the lines “Them that's got shall get / Them that's not shall lose / So the Bible said and it still is news.” That’s so smart, and so true. It’s the oldest thing we know and yet, somehow, that’s still the way that society is allowed to work.
That's right. It's all governed by money. She’s saying that those born with a silver spoon further themselves in the world, but let’s not overlook those rare individuals who make their own way in life. It’s so beautiful, it’s like reading Zora Neale Hurston or something. It’s poetry.
Lo is out now via 675 Records. Paula Cole plays London's Union Chapel tonight (23 August), and The Long Road Festival in Leicestershire tomorrow.
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