Rockport, MA · singer-songwriter · alt-pop

Paula Cole

1 upcoming festival

Lilith-era songwriting with jazz training underneath and a voice that goes places the radio edits never showed — the cowboys question still stands.

Paula Cole is a singer, songwriter and pianist from Rockport, Massachusetts, who studied jazz singing and improvisation before moving into pop songwriting. She came to wide attention in the 1990s, touring as a backing vocalist with Peter Gabriel and then releasing her own records, which pair confessional writing with arrangements drawn from folk, soul and art pop.

Her voice is her most distinctive instrument — capable of moving from a whisper to a full-throated wail within a phrase, and used with a theatricality that owes something to her jazz training. She was closely associated with the wave of women songwriters who defined the Lilith Fair era, and has continued to write, record and perform since, often producing her own material.

singer-songwriteralt-pop