Paula Cole Doesn’t Want to Wait
The 1998 Grammy Awards should have been a triumphant night for the singer-songwriter Paula Cole. She was nominated for seven awards for her second album, “This Fire,” including Producer of the Year, Non-Classical, an honor that has yet to go to a woman (a factoid that she calls “deeply fucked”). That night, Cole, then twenty-nine, performed “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” and won Best New Artist, beating out Hanson, Erykah Badu, Fiona Apple, and Puff Daddy. Yet all anyone could talk about, afterward, was the sight of Cole’s unshaven armpits at the ceremony. On “The Tonight Show,” Jay Leno trotted out a Cole doll and shined his shoes with its copious pit hair. When Entertainment Weekly airbrushed out her fuzz, Cole called the magazine “cowardly.” “If I look back,” she said the other day, “I see myself just nose-diving into unhappiness. I felt like prey. There was a deadening behind my eyes.”
Cole, who is now fifty-eight and has an Earth Mother vibe—baggy jeans, chore coat, beaded necklaces, orange Hokas—was sitting in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park. She had come, as she put it, “to commune with pollinators” before kicking off a national tour marking the thirtieth anniversary of “This Fire.” She views the tour, along with the release of a new two-album set called “Sonic Memoir: Demos 1989-1998,” as a chance to reclaim the idealistic artist she was before the music business chewed her up. “After my third record, I had a complete nervous breakdown on tour in Germany,” she said. Although she stepped away from the industry, she never stopped working, quietly releasing eight more records, including two that she funded through Kickstarter. “I have found solace in being independent and not working with labels anymore,” she said. “I get to keep the music pure.” She survives mostly on royalties from her 1997 single “I Don’t Want to Wait,” which became the theme song to “Dawson’s Creek.” “That song is like Robin Hood,” she said. “I take that money and put it into my lesser-known art.”
She is still astounded by the fascination with her grooming preferences. “I was just this small-town girl,” she said, shaking her silver hair, which she’d braided and pinned across her head, milkmaid style. Going au naturel was an extension of her bohemian upbringing in coastal Massachusetts, where her mother worked as an artist, and where her father was a biology professor and the bass player in a polka band. “Music was a living language in our house,” she said, then tilted her head. “Listen to them!” she said, referring to some chirping crickets. “They are sending out messages to each other, like ‘O.K., it’s the end of the season, the light is changing. We better mate and propagate.’ ” She went on,“My dad studied entomology. I think we need to befriend insects. They are the largest kingdom existing on Earth, and we are fucking it up. We’re dusting our crops with glyphosates. We’re destroying soil. We import compost. It’s completely illogical, and we’re headed for a breakdown.”
Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond
Cole splits her time between Manhattan and ten acres in Massachusetts, where she cultivates the land. A few years back, she discovered a book called “The Resilient Farm and Homestead,” by the naturalist Ben Falk, and became a convert to his “permaculture” philosophy. Cole dug rainwater swales, installed a woodstove, and planted vegetables. (She hasn’t eaten meat since she was fourteen.) This summer, she visited Falk’s farm in Vermont, where she worked alongside hippies half her age. “I came screeching in as this old city person,” she said. “I had to share a bathroom with nine men, which was really hard-core. Everyone was barefoot, just slipping in and out of their Crocs, and I was, like, ew. But I overcame that, and started putting my feet on the land. You feel your bones spread out. It’s fantastic.”
Cole strolled along a path lined with daylilies and Japanese anemones. She smiled at a sculpture of a boy and a girl from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden.” “It has never been easy to be a woman in the public eye,” she said. Cole was instrumental in launching Lilith Fair, in 1997. “I’d opened for Sarah McLachlan,” she said. “Every night I’d go out and I would thank her for having a female opener, because it just didn’t happen. Promoters said women don’t sell tickets.”
Turning back to the new record, she said, “I cringe when I listen to some of those old recordings. I’m out of tune, and it’s messy. But the whole idea of it was for the fans to hear the process of me arriving at myself as a producer and as a human.” On tour, she will sing “This Fire” in the original key. “I’m postmenopausal and my voice has changed,” she said. “But I refuse to lose an octave.” ♦