Thursday, March 15   12:00 a.m.
Cedar Street Courtyard   (208 W 4th St)

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Paula Cole

BY PAUL BUCHANAN


I am standing halfway back in the empty stalls when Paula starts singing
at the sound-check. Burt Bacharach is playing piano, and I am a kid, watching his favorite baseball team practice. Everything else around me disappears, like the whole world is silent, except for this one event. The crew and production people all stand still, or sink into empty seats and watch. And this
incredible sound takes shape in the air, as inescapable as the sirens' song
…and then turns and flies straight at me, and pierces my chest. I turn to
Bobby (her producer), who is smiling, and doesn't even have to say “told you.” I am utterly moved, crying soft, involuntary tears… gentle like the ones I used to cry; not angry anymore, or righteous or sophisticated or defensive. Just tears, from when you used to still like yourself well enough.

I have been summoned six thousand miles to sing here, because I sing too. But
not like this. I know music is the speech of the angels. I know all about
that. Being a singer is like being a spy: never refer directly to exactly
what you are trying to achieve. I know how to shape the air, how to be in the
moment,.. how to give voice to what cannot simply be said. But I am from the
outskirts of the source. I am a workman, and proud of being that. This is the voice that the angels listen to and weep. It is as pure as the air it lives in. It is a quantum leap; where there is no difference between technique and emotional content. This is the one we have been looking for. This is the one we need. I don't think I have ever heard a purer sound. It is the purest water from the mountains… when you've lived for years on dust and cynicism.

When I meet Paula, I am like a kid with a sports star, bumbling and uncertain. Even she seems a little embarrassed about having unfurled her flag so unreservedly in public after all this time: I'm told she hasn't been
singing in public for a while.

She never really explains that; she tells me of circumstances, of times, of her
need for her darling child. But what I think is: How did you ever manage to
stay out there for that long before you stopped to rest? A stage had ended
for her back then. She went into hiatus, abeyance, to prepare for this second
stage... which seems to be beginning about now, and she is giddy and afraid
at the same time in emerging from her privacy.

At home, - to continue the sporting analogies- we say of sportsman and
Women..."form is temporary, class is permanent." The second half of that
applies here. After that first time, I watched and listened to her singing
every chance I got. Each time was like watching a high wire artist stepping
among the clouds... I held my breath, to listen more, not to miss a
morsel. Paula is not a good singer; she is a great singer. She is timeless, a
classic, a great American soul. She will make you believe in us all again.

There is too much noise in the world; tune it out, turn the dials until it
disappears and concentrate only this. Tell me you don't feel it too.



Paula Cole's fourth album, Courage, is about starting over.

Born the daughter of musicians in Rockport, Massachusetts, Cole grew
up singing for fun; American songbooks, traditional folksongs,
Christmas carols, a capella harmonies. While finding kindred spirits
in records, she became a fixture in her school musicals, which
catapulted her toward a scholarship for the Berklee Collegbe of Music
in Boston, where she studied jazz singing and improvisation.

"I wanted to get inside the chord structure of songs, so that I could
improvise inside the changes, " she says. "but it wasn't meant to
be...

"I began writing my own songs, and it took me down another path."
While a senior at Berklee, she was offered a deal with a jazz label,
but declined. "It came too easily, and I didn't want to be limited
just to jazz. Something wasn't quite right. So I continued singing
weddings and waitressing as I tried to find my inner songs."

In 1993, Peter Gabriel asked her to join his Secret World Tour, after
hearing Cole's Imago debut, "Harbinger." Throughout 1994-6, Cole
toured America extensively, building a foundation of support that then
embraced her 1997 album "This Fire." It became a breakthrough smash,
yielding the hits "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" and "I Don't Want
to Wait" (which was used as the theme song to the hit WB show Dawson's
Creek), and the 1997 Grammy win for Best New Artist. In 1999, she
released her third, spiritually soul-influenced album "Amen."

From today's perspective, she has created her finest album: tender,
tough, older, wiser… Cole steers her way through the manifold
experiences of an adult American woman who has seen much, lost much,
gained much, and yet has regained her innocence. Guided by producer
and friend Bobby Colomby and Decca Records, it feels like the work of
a woman who is in the right place at the right time. Getting to that
simple place, as we all know, takes Courage every day.

This song of life is the work of someone back from the prairie. Even
more certain that life is hard-won but good, and that from experience
should come grace.