This Fire was self-produced and self-written by Paula Cole following her stint as a backing vocalist for Peter Gabriel in the early 90’s. This matters because the album breaks a lot of traditional molds we’re accustomed to in modern pop music (will get into that in a minute) and I’ve found it quite impressive Cole effectively did it on her own. During the recording of this album she sang and played basically an army of instruments– piano, juno, tube, Wurlitzer, harmonium, beat box, toy xylophone, didjeridu, clarinet– filling in the missing pieces with a collection of session players to round out the sound. It was a smash hit for Cole and sent her popularity soaring globally, eventually earning a total of seven Grammy nominations including Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Producer of the Year. In a word, Paula Cole is a bad ass and this album is deserving of all its accolades.
90’s pop music was great in many ways, primarily due to the artistic creativity artists were afforded in that time period. There’s a pretty distinct difference in pop music today compared to the 90’s. I would classify 90’s pop music as possessing a darkness to it that was underscored by dynamic chord changes and a willingness to take the listener somewhere else in the journey of a song. Sting has a great interview with Rick Beato that underscores a lot of these points— as he describes, songwriting nowadays is minimalist with simple structures, with a notable absence of the traditional bridge in a song. Sting has a great quote where he says “For me the bridge is therapy. You set a situation out in a song, for example my girlfriend left and I’m lonely, and you reiterate that. But then you get to the bridge and a different chord comes in, and you can expand upon the idea that maybe this girl isn’t the only one and I can look elsewhere, and that viewpoint leads to a new outlook. And for me that’s therapy, that non-circular structure, which is missing.”
Love that insight from Sting there, and it is a principle that plays itself out all throughout the course of Paula Cole’s album This Fire. From Cole’s emphatic growl amidst a sea of dissonant feedback at the end of “Tiger”, her operatic flourishes to close out “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”, and the slow menacing march of “Mississippi” that feels like it’s building to a disaster, Cole manages to combine sugary pop hooks alongside soul-baring gut punches. The range of the human experience is laid bare in this body of work. And that’s inclusive of her signature song “I Don’t Want to Wait”, made famous for being the intro song to teen drama powerhouse TV series Dawson’s Creek. Many will remember the iconic hook of the chorus (which still gives me chills to this day), but her knack for understanding the craft of songwriting is laid bare in a bridge that accentuates the fact that life is temporal and precious and beautiful, even if the sadness that comes along with it can feel overwhelming at times.
Standout Songs: “I Don’t Want to Wait”, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”, “Carmen”
