The beauty of Paula Cole’s 1996 album This Fire, which she will play in its entirety this Sunday at City Winery in New York City, is that it’s not what you think it is — or was — if you were just a casual fan eating up her hit singles “I Don’t Want to Wait” and “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” It was so much more. The 11-track album was raw, real and, in some spots, as far as you can get from Top 40 radio in the 90s. And some folks weren’t ready for that.
“I kept running into them even when the hits were on the radio,” she laughs. “Sometimes people booked me and they might have had a very white, proper Christian audience, and I go up there and some of my songs are pretty far out with this and that, and they were offended. I remember one concert I did in Texas where people stood up and walked out.” Twenty years later, Cole is celebrating the anniversary of an album that achieved a rare mix of being loved by her fans but also highly underrated. It’s a moment that snuck up on her.
“It’s so weird how quickly it goes,” she said. “It’s been 20 years since This Fire, and it happened really quickly. And then you realize, Wow, I probably only have another 20 years left that are going to be active years, God willing, and life is really short. I want to think it’s long, I look at it long, but it goes by really quickly.” Thankfully, Cole isn’t choosing to mark this moment by sitting home in New England and spinning the vinyl for old times’ sake. She’ll be in the city she called home for 12 years and bringing the fans what they wanted.
“I feel like I have really core fans that know the content of my catalog and my character,” she said. “But all those radio fans, they’re fair-weather fans. I have a smaller audience now and they’re really awesome. The fans put the idea in my head and they asked for it. I did it because of them.” Yet the funny thing about This Fire, which went double platinum and hit #20 on the Billboard album charts, is that it almost didn’t get made. At least not the way Cole wanted it to.
“The first attempt went really badly,” said Cole, who was looking to follow up her debut album Harbinger, which got a good response and garnered her a European tour with Peter Gabriel. But when her label, Imago, went under, she wound up with Warner Bros and as she described the early This Fire sessions, “The music wasn’t happening in the studio. Frustrated and knowing the importance of the second album, she decided on a bold, but risky, course of action.
“This is my life,” Cole said. “I need to stand up for my life. So I had to walk into Warner Bros and say, ‘You know that hundred thousand dollars you just spent on this incarnation of an album I really don’t like? Well, we have to throw that away and please let me have the rest of the budget. Please let me make this album. I can do it.’ Amazingly, they said yes, though I definitely has some naysayers there in the company.” Two million records sold later, those naysayers deserved a little “I told you so.” Cole admits with a laugh that she never got to give it to them. “I don’t think I ever did. I was just too busy running on that hamster wheel. Be careful what you wish for.”
With the success of the album, Cole, an admitted introvert, was thrown into a hurricane she didn’t want to be in. “I didn’t enjoy the fame at all,” she said. “It felt horribly uncomfortable and unnatural and I just wanted to get out of that spotlight as quickly as possible.” Subsequent albums didn’t reach the commercial heights of This Fire, but it didn’t matter. Cole had made a hit album her way, opening the door for women in the business who wanted to follow suit as controllers of their own destiny.
“It felt DIY and independent, even though I was on a major label,” she said. “This was rarely done. I only knew of Kate Bush as someone who had ever produced herself, and she was off in England, where they treasure their own eccentrics. But here, you usually had some kind of svengali man that did the production for you and was the ‘go to’ for the label. And this was different. And it was difficult. But I knew what I needed to say, and I didn’t want a middle man or be spoken for. I just wanted to do it. And so I did.” From: https://medium.com/ko63-music/paula-cole-twenty-years-later-this-fire-still-burns-7fa03163cc16
