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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Equalizers: Producer, Singer-Songwriter Paula Cole
00:24:14
Musician and producer Paula Cole talks about her career and approach to music as part of the Women's History Month series Equalizers: Women In Music Production.
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- [00:00]
Announcer
WNYC Studios is supported by Carnegie hall, which presents the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welsermust and soprano Osmit Gregorian performing works by Haydn, Strauss, Janacek and Puccini. March 18. Tickets@carnegiehall.org.
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Paula Cole
Listener support WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm grateful you are here. Coming up on the show, it's been five years since COVID first struck and all week long we'll be talking about how it changed how we work and live. Later in the show today, we'll talk about relationships, how they change during and after Covid. And we wanna hear from you about your own experience. Then we'll discuss how a simple dinner party among young people facing loss led to a THR support group for others to grieve in community. One of the co founders, Carla Fernandez, has a new book. It's titled Renegade A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. She'll join us in studio to discuss and we'll speak with chef Eric Ajipong about his new cookbook inspired by his Ghanaian roots. That's our plan. So let's get this started with Paula Cole. In 1997, Paula Cole was nominated for seven Grammy Awards for her second album, this Fire. She won for best new artist. There's this hit song, you know the one. Cole's nominations were great, but the historic, historic nomination was her nod for producer of the year, non classical. It made her the first woman nominated solo without a male collaborator for that award. Only five women have been nominated since. Paula Cole has gone on to produce nearly all of her own albums as well as songs for other artists, too. She has a new album out now. It's called Low. For another installment of our series, Equalizers, Women in music production, I'm joined now by Paula Cole. Hi, Paula.
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Paula Cole
Hi, Alison. It's so lovely to see you.
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Alison Stewart
It's nice to see you as well. So before this fire, what kind of production experience had you had?
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Paula Cole
Let's see. You know, my boyfriend was an engineer producer. I was a student at Berkeley College of Music and I was kind of living in the studios at the time while he was finishing up his degree. And so I just learned so much from him. We were home producing demos constantly. So I was learning just by doing in Boston. Then we moved to San Francisco where I was prolific and making home demos. And those demos got me signed. So I never had produced a proper album. But and this is pre digital. So, you know, imagine all the. The pre digital, nascent technology. It was such a pain in the ass, all of that stuff. Tape and dats and adats, and it was just constantly changing. But I was lear at home. And then I worked with legendary engineer and producer Kevin Killen, who worked with me on my first album, Harbinger. And I learned a lot from him. And I also learned that I wanted to do it myself, that I felt confident that I could do it, that I wanted to do it. I didn't want a middle person. I wanted it to go straight to tape because we were still working with tape.
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Alison Stewart
What were those conversations like when you said, I. I want to produce this record?
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Paula Cole
Oh, I mean, hard, because it wasn't going the way I had hoped with Kevin on the second album. And I loved him and trusted him, but for. For some reason, the energies just were not flowing. It was not flowing. And I very much wanted this to be a live feeling of an album. Like microphones in the room cap, the air molecules moving between instruments. And my drummer, Jay Belaro, who's since gone on to become a legendary drummer because T Bone Burnett discovered him. But Jay, you know, we grew up together. I fought hard to bring Jay into the music business. And it wasn't. The tracking wasn't going well between Kevin and Jay, and I felt I needed to protect Jay, and so I had to abort the, you know, the album. That. And that meant going to Warner Brothers and saying, I'm so sorry, I need. Let's just throw away $100,000 worth of recorded content and I want to produce it myself. It meant, you know, it meant that I lost my friendship temporarily with Kevin. That was hard. I. I lost my relationship with the guitar player Jerry Leonard, too, because they were mates and I. And I. It was scary. And I didn't know if they would give me the time of day. It was so hard. And then they gave me half a budget. They said, fine, but you have to finish this within half a budget, no more. So that was their way of being maybe a little bit paternal and patron. Right is to make me kind of scrap together. So I would be looking. It was so many phone calls, trying to find tape at cost, studio time at a minimal fraction, working in the late hours, like, just getting it all under budget was their way of kind of keeping me tempered. And it was very difficult. And I lost my friendships temporarily, but I delivered. Jay and I, we went in together because we are. We were like soulmates in music. We went in drums, piano, Keyboards, everything that I did, all the vocals. We cut all 11 tracks in two and a half days. You know, live. That album is live. And then we had the guitar player, Greg Le, come in from la. He recorded his guitar parts about three and a half days. Tony Levin, literally half a day. And I had worked with Tony. He's a bass player that. Yeah, incredible. I met him on the Peter Gabriel tour and I always knew I wanted him to play. So it was very fast. It had to be, because I was under budget deadline. And sometimes, you know, brilliance is made with those kinds of constraints. And I already knew what the sequence would be. We, you know, 11 songs, I knew the exact sequence. So we recorded track 11 down to track one. So I don't Want to Wait was the very first. It was the 11th song on the album, but the very first track we. We cut. And it happened quickly. And I realized after all of it that it was when I was given that Grammy nomination for Best Producer that. And people told me, you're the first woman who's ever been nominated solo, that I realized it was like dawn and the Clouds. That's why it was so hard. That's why people treated me so patronizingly, especially when I was interviewing prospective engineers. They all assumed. They assumed I was hiring them as a producer. Except one, Roger Mutineau, and he got the gig. You know.
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Interviewer
What gave you the confidence to go ahead and produce your own record?
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Paula Cole
Some naivete. Because I didn't realize that I was embarking into such a patriarchal land. I didn't realize just how male it was. So I had just kind of stood shoulder to shoulder with student engineers and producers and learned a lot. And I trusted my ears and I trusted my intuition. And that's something that I still do to this day, and I still stand by it. And I think that's a great quality of a producer that's kind of God given. You can learn other skills, like engineering. I'm not a great engineer, but I don't think you have to be a great engineer to be a great producer. I think it's ears and intuition and musicality. Arranging, like other aspects. There's so many aspects to being a producer. Sometimes it's your connections, but I think ultimately it comes down to ears and intuition. And I just. I observed quietly through the processes that I'd been through in home recording in my first album, the attempt of the second, that I. I kind of knew. I knew what I wanted to hear and I knew I needed to take the helm. And that was very Difficult to do. You know, I think, like, good leaders don't actually want to be leaders. They. They would rather take a hit for the team. And it's kind of like that with me. I'll take a crappy bunk so I can give someone with sleep apnea the. The Star Lounge at the back of the bus, you know.
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Interviewer
I'm speaking with musician Paula Cole for our March series, Women in Music Production. Paula was the first woman nominated solo for Producer of the Year Non Classical at the Grammys. She has a new album out. It's called Low. I want to play from the album. I want to play Tiger from your original album, this Fire. To give people a sense of the breadth of sound of this album. Let's play a little bit and we can talk about it on the other side.
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Musical Clip
I've left Bethlehem I feel free I've left the girl I was supposed to be Someday I'll be born I'm so tired of being shy I'm not that girl anymore I'm not that straight A anymore Now I want to sit my legs wide open and laugh so loud that the whole dam restaurant will turn and look at me. Look at the tiger jumping out of her mouth. I've left Bethlehem I feel free I've left the girl I was supposed to be so say I'll be Bo.
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Alison Stewart
Paula, when you think back to the time, what was the most audacious production decision you made on this fire?
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Paula Cole
I think Tiger encapsulates a lot of the audaciousness, especially. I encourage the listeners to go listen to the full track. I mean, it's the way it starts, the way it ends. It's a palindrome. It starts as it ends. I used backward vocal. I. It's. It's very different. It's different in that we cut the drums, the piano, and the vocal first. I'm not afraid to be a little crazy. In fact, I tell. You know, I've told my students for years and anyone who cares to listen, like, embrace your eccentricity. It makes you unique. And so I really did. There's odd meter in there. There's a lot of tensions. I play clarinet. There's. The guitar work is like a lot of evo and kind of sustained textural sounds. Piano drives the rhythm with the drums. And then the bass comes at. Only at the very end. And it is grand. It is a gorgeous entrance by Tony Levin. I always heard that in my head, so I'm proud of that. Also. I like the synth bass. Like, it's synth bass at the Top and for most of the tune, because sometimes out of those old analog keyboards and I used a Juno analog keyboard on that. It gets you a really fat. That bass sound in a way that a bass can't always get. I also like aspects of where have all the Cowboys Gone? Because I didn't want bass on that track. I wanted it to sound great. Coming through a crappy transistor radio. I added crowd noise underneath the whole track. And those things give ambiance and freshness. So, like, from track to track, there was freshness. Like, sometimes it would be bass heavy and sometimes it would be light. Sometimes it would be ironic and wry. And sometimes, most of the time, I'm quite serious, probably to a fault.
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Alison Stewart
Well, let's listen to a little bit of where have all the cowboys gone?
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Paula Cole
1, 2, 3, 4.
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Musical Clip
Oh, you get me ready in your 56 Chevy why don't we go sit down in the shade Take shelter on my front porch the dandelion sun scorching like a glass of gold lemonade I will do the laundry if you pay all the bills where is my John Wick? Where is my Paris sound? Where is my happ ending? Where are all the cowboys go? Why don't you stay the evening Kick back and watch the TV and I'll fix a little something to eat My.
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Interviewer
Guest is Paula Cole. You're a songwriter and a producer. Do the same. Are they the same skills, they take the same skills, or what's different about them?
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Paula Cole
They're different, but it's nice when you have a little bit of both and you can be thinking with your producer brain as you're writing, which in a sense is a lot of arrangement thoughts or sounds like, what instrumentation do you want the song to be? So it really. The producer brain really influences my songwriting. And I almost always think of Jay playing drums when I'm. When I'm writing. Or sometimes I'll write with a specific groove of his in mind. But they are different. They are different and they're different worlds that overlap. Songwriting, my. My favorite kind of songwriting is highly autobiographical and I love the artists that they kind of slit their wrists for us. They really feel and they tell us their process. They let us into their. Their lives. I love those highly autobiographical songwriters like John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. I. I think of them as some of the most highly autobiographical songwriters. And I. I love them so dearly for that. Of course I appreciate third person. Of course I do. But ultimately, those first person perspective songs that are literally like living journals of an artist. I admire that so much and that's probably been my biggest influence as a songwriter.
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Interviewer
That's interesting. How do you approach it as a producer being as in theory you're not supposed to be living it. The songwriter has done that. You of the producer have to come in. How does a producer approach that?
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Paula Cole
I guess that's when I'm a little more detached. Like an eagle's perspective looking at the work and I don't know why I'm. I can, I can do that. It's. This is all like a very intuitive process and I grew up with music at such a young age. You know, my dad played. He played polka gigs on weekends like. And he didn't want me to go into the music business because he knew how hard it was. But I, I was just raised with music as a living language and it's been my primary language. So it's facile for me. Talking about it, thinking about it, kind of zooming in the microscope for the songwriting process or the journalistic process and then zooming the microscope out in looking at it from a more macro perspective with production. I don't know why that's intuitive for me, but it is. But if. And sometimes I've been stuck and I need help and I've worked with producers and they've helped me so much. Kevin Killen was brilliant on my first album, Harbinger. Just brilliant. He helped me learn, he opened my eyes. The album sounds gorgeous. Also coming out of my divorce and taking an eight year hiatus from the music business, which is like near death in pop music and motherhood and all of that, like stepping away, I really needed someone to help me get back in again. So I worked with Bobby Columbia at that phase on my Courage album. But how do I. It's highly intuitive and it's difficult to explain but it's like zooming out a microscope looking at the work. And then I. If you could see like my, the walls of my, my room here I have paper all over and I. This is like part of my process as a producer too is like for me to get a larger perspective on things. When you have a big work, like an album or I'm working with about 60 songs right now for all my old demos. I'm going to do a demos album and I've. Oh content from the early years. There's so much. Or like when I'm doing a big project like a musical, I need to like get large whiteboard pieces of paper on the wall so I can see it and I, I'm. I'M very into sequence. That's very important. Heads and tails. Listening to heads and tails of songs, how they flow into each other. Different time feels, different signatures, different keys. What's the lyrical story I want to tell with the whole of the album from the first word to. Is there, Is there change? Is there like topography for the listener to enjoy the ride? And most of all, what is the artist saying? What am I saying? What is the artist saying? So I'm thinking about all of this and I want it to be digestible in an increasingly short attention span world. So there's so many aspects that I'm considering when creating an album. And it's joyful, actually. I love this work. Just love it.
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Alison Stewart
I'm speaking with musician Paula Cole for our March series, Equalizers. Women in Music Production. You've released Low last year. You produce it yourself. When you think about what does an. I think it's your 11th album.
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Paula Cole
Is that right?
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Alison Stewart
Yeah. Your 11th album. Forget something like that. Your latest album that you produced versus your early albums. What's the difference in production?
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Paula Cole
Well, I wanted to. With Low, I wanted to return to live musicians in a room. And now that Jay has worked with T Bone Burnett for years and he's gotten very comfortable with T Bone's process and he really enjoys working with T Bone's primary engineer, Mike Piersante, who's won like 12 Grammys in engineering. He's simply amazing. I know that Mike Piersante is an extension of Jay's drum sound. So I wanted to work with Mike and Jay and make it comfortable from them, from the kick drum up to the highest vocal spanning the whole sonic rainbow. And I wanted to be in a room, a good sounding room. We went to the Village in Los Angeles, which was the room that Fleetwood Mac built after their rumor. They built that room for their Tusk album. And it sounds beautiful for live recording. So I kind of go about it organically like that, thinking about the band. Who are the people, how are they going to flesh out this music? I just sent them very rough home demos of like, you know, just press record on my phone, me at the piano or guitar playing my songs. They. They conceive of their parts. We get in the room and we. It was very live and spontaneous and intuitive. And these are people that I've worked with for years, so I trust them. That's everything. A great engineer capturing. Like, you should see the room mics in the corners of the room. I think air sounds so beautiful. And that's something that is lost with a highly Digital emailed album. You don't get the air. You don't get the live air molecules moving and dancing. So this. I wanted to return to that with Low. I. I had that a bit on on Men, but it's often there's like budget issues or life issues that impose themselves on albums and you're working with where you are in that meantime of your life. Each album is like a Polaroid snapshot. Do you have the time and the budget to make a grand live album? What do you hear? I don't know if they're alike really, just in that. I think the only thing that's alike is me and Jay. I think Low is softer. I think I was screaming a lot in my 20s. You know, I still have to perform those songs. It's. It's intense. Channeling that 20 year old rage again. I do. And people love it. But it's like harder for me now. I'm in a gentler space.
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Interviewer
Yeah, we're gonna go out in a song called the Replacements and Dinosaur junior off your album Low. Could you set this up for us before we go?
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Paula Cole
Oh, absolutely. I'd be happy to. I wrote this for Mark Hutchins and I mentioned him earlier. He was my. He was my partner in all things my. My boyfriend coming out of Berkeley College of Music. He was a music production and engineer major. He taught me so much. And so he died early at age 51. He has a couple kids. He was working on the Colbert show when he died. I. I love him. I miss him. He taught me so much. I wouldn't be the producer I am today without Mark. And he introduced me to all this awesome early 90s alternative music. And I was just honoring him and the music and the process we shared. And this is called Replacements in Dinosaur junior For Mark Hutchins, Paula Cole.
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Interviewer
Thank you so much for being with us.
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Paula Cole
Such a pleasure. Love to talk about it. Thank you.
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Interviewer
Here's the Replacements and Dinosaur junior.
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Paula Cole
The more you live the more you lose.
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Musical Clip
I lost you far too young I need to turn.
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Announcer
WNYC Studios is supported by Carnegie hall, which presents the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser Must performing Stravinsky's Petrushka and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. March 19th.
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Ira Flatow
Tickets@carnegiehall.org I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high quality news about science, technology and medicine. News you won't get anywhere else. And now that political news is 24 7. Our audience is turning to us to know about the really important stuff in their lives. Cancer, climate change, Genetic engineering, Childhood diseases. Our sponsors know the value of science and health news. For more sponsorship information, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.