Rockport, MA · singer-songwriter · alt-pop

Paula Cole

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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 was born in 1968 and grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts, the daughter of an elementary art teacher and a biology professor who also played bass in a polka band; her older sister played piano. She was class president at Rockport High School and performed in school productions before enrolling at Berklee College of Music, where she studied jazz singing and improvisation with Bob Stoloff and sang with the vocal group Vox One.

After graduating she turned down a deal with the jazz label GRP Records and moved to San Francisco, writing songs while living with roommates on little money; one of the ideas from that period became "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" She signed to Imago Records in 1992 and toured as a backing vocalist on Peter Gabriel's Secret World Tour, but her debut album, Harbinger, went largely unpromoted when the label folded.

Her second album, This Fire (1996), reached number 20 on the Billboard 200 and produced two hits, the triple Grammy-nominated "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" and "I Don't Want to Wait," later used as the theme for Dawson's Creek. She headlined Lilith Fair in 1997 and 1998, won the Grammy for Best New Artist, and became the first woman nominated for Producer of the Year without a male collaborator.

Her third album, Amen (1999), marked a sharp stylistic turn that cost her some of her earlier audience. Later records moved between jazz, on Courage (2007), and a return to folk-rock on Ithaca (2010), with her most recent album, Lo, released in 2024. She has taught at Berklee College of Music since 2013, and her writing has taken on gender stereotypes, the environment, the history of American slavery and the Iraq war.

Her voice is her most distinctive instrument: capable of moving from a whisper to a full-throated wail within a phrase, 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.

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