Paula Cole Discusses Songwriting: Stream the Nakedly Examined Music Interview Online

This week’s Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­cast fea­tures the Gram­my-win­ning singer-song­writer Paula Cole. After back­ing Peter Gabriel in the ear­ly 90s on his Secret World tour, she had major hits with “I Don’t Want to Wait” (lat­er the theme song of Daw­son’s Creek) and “Where Have All the Cow­boys Gone.” She has released ten stu­dio albums since 1994.

On this pod­cast, you’ll hear four full songs with dis­cus­sions of their details: “Blues in Gray” from Rev­o­lu­tion (2019), “Father” from 7 (2015), and “Hush, Hush, Hush” from This Fire (1996), plus “Steal Away/Hidden in Plain Sight” from Amer­i­can Quilt (2021). Intro: “I Don’t Want to Wait,” also from This Fire. For more, see paulacole.com.

After her hit-mak­ing, her style took a rather sharp turn with the 1999 Amen album; here’s “I Believe in Love,” a dis­co tune from that. Her Rev­o­lu­tion album has some much more direct­ly polit­i­cal songs like its title track. She’s done some jazz and folk cov­ers with her recent Amer­i­can Quilt and Bal­lads album, like this tune. Here she is live in 1998 and a more recent stripped-down appear­ance. She can still sing “I Don’t Want to Wait” with pret­ty much the same tone, and in fact the ver­sion used to intro­duce the pod­cast is the artist’s re-record­ing, not the orig­i­nal.

Pho­to by Ebru Yildiz. Inter­view edit­ing by Tyler His­lop of Pix­el­box Media.

Naked­ly Exam­ined Music is a pod­cast host­ed by Mark Lin­sen­may­er, who also hosts The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast, and Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv. He releas­es music under the name Mark Lint.