Paula Cole has always been a little bit ahead, a little bit sideways, and a lot misunderstood.
After the triple-Grammy breakthrough of This Fire, she could have played it safe. A few more wistful ballads, a few less political statements, and maybe she’d still be racking up mainstream hits instead of explaining to people that Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? wasn’t a sincere plea for patriarchy’s return. “People thought I was being fundamental,” she tells Kyle Meredith, noting that even Rush Limbaugh gave it airtime—“which was very bizarre for me.”
By 1999, the backlash had arrived, just in time for Cole to release Amen, a socially conscious, genre-blurring album that predated Beyoncé's Lemonade feminism by almost two decades and couldn’t have been more out of sync with the pop charts’ new agenda: TRL glitter, belly shirts, and bubblegum. “It was a turning point,” she says. “I made a different kind of statement, and there was backlash.” Rather than pivot toward safety, she stepped away—eight years out of the spotlight, raising her daughter and regrouping.
Now she’s returned with Revolution, a spiritual and sonic cousin to Amen, arriving exactly 20 years later and equally unwilling to shut up and sing. “I’ve written enough love songs. It’s time to write for healing,” Cole says. “We need to talk about the planet. We need to talk about race. We need to talk about women. Silence hasn’t worked.”
You don’t need a press release to know Revolution is a protest record. The title gives it away. So does her choice of the album’s lone cover: Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me. “He didn’t want to sing love songs anymore,” she says. “He wanted to sing about Vietnam, about humanity, about the planet—and that was in 1971.” Covering Gaye, she says, wasn’t something she did lightly as a white woman, but as someone steeped in the jazz tradition and educated at the feet of Miles, Billie, Ella, and Coltrane. “I’ve worshipped at the altar of this music for decades—with humility,” she says. “This is me continuing that conversation.”
The rest of Revolution is all original, anchored by urgent mantras (“Hope Is Everywhere”), hard-won clarity (“Silent”), and political resistance dressed up in danceable grooves. “I wanted to get asses out of seats. I wanted us to feel jubilant in our kitchens,” she says, laughing. Her engineer Pete Min called it “prog-disco,” but Cole isn’t thinking about genre labels. She’s thinking about how to sneak truth into people’s ears while they’re moving their bodies.
These days, when she’s not on stage or in the studio, Cole is a professor at Berklee College of Music, pushing her students to dig deeper and speak louder. “They need to write a song a week, and they need to write socially and politically,” she says. “But I learn from them, too. Their openness, their refusal to be silent—it inspired Silent. They pushed me to tell my story.”
In the most unexpected twist, her old hits are now having a second life with Gen Z. “Sometimes I feel like they get me more than my own generation did,” she says. Artists like THEY. have reimagined her music in ways that make her emotional. “THEY.’s version of I Don’t Want to Wait—they called it Dante’s Creek—it’s brilliant. Sometimes I like it more than mine.”
There’s no bitterness in her voice, only gratitude that her words are still echoing. “Back then, people didn’t get the irony, the nuance. Now? Now it’s living. It’s moving through generations. That’s all I ever wanted.”
If Revolution sounds like the work of someone racing the clock, that’s not an accident. Cole’s sense of purpose has only deepened with time. “I don’t know why I feel this sense of mortality,” she admits, “but I do. There’s so much left to say.”
The revolution she’s after isn’t just political. It’s personal. It’s artistic. It’s existential. And it’s far from over.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
