Review | Paula Cole’s Voice Rings Out Strong

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Paula Cole hit the spotlight as a solo artist with her 1997 hit “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone.” Starting her career as a backup singer for Peter Gabriel on his elaborate 1993–1994 Secret World Tour, where they filmed a concert video back when concert videos were a BIG DEAL — and it went on to win a Grammy as “Best Music Video, Long Form” and the subsequent live album became a hit around the U.S. and Europe — Cole spoke a little bit about that almost 30-year-old tour at her April 24 show at the Lobero. 

“It was five star everything and it was all downhill from there. I learned so much on that tour and from that experience — I learned I didn’t want to be a backup singer,” she shared. 

And indeed, she’s been performing as a solo artist ever since, reaching deep into her catalog of songs as she did in Santa Barbara to play both her almost universally recognizable hits like “Cowboys,” “Me” (from the 1996 album This Fire), and probably most famously “I Don’t Want to Wait” (from that same 1996 album). That song came into the zeitgeist in a big way as the theme song for Dawson’s Creek, the 1998-2003 teen television series that also made stars out of James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, and Joshua Jackson.

With long blonde hair and a long blonde dress (which looked like a cross between Stevie Nicks and The Witches of Eastwick), her beautiful voice — which can range from the jazzy (she attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied jazz singing and improvisation) to hard rocking, then loving and soulful — took us through an evening of songs that included deep cuts like “Tiger,” “I Believe In Love,” “Carmen,” “Strong Beautiful Woman,” and “Feelin’ Love.”

New numbers from her 2024 album Lo (her 11th studio album) also dotted the set. Those included “Follow the Moon,” “Green Eyes Crying,” “take it take it take it,” “Wildflower,” “Flying Home,” and the poignant “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr,.” dedicated to her late friend and artistic mentor Mark Hutchins who turned her on to a lot of music, including those two bands.

As much as we appreciated the new music and understood how annoying it might be to write a song in your 20s that people want you to continue playing for the rest of your life, the audience (myself included) still really, really wanted to hear her play “I Don’t Want to Wait.” I was afraid it wasn’t going to happen. We waited and waited and waited for that one till the encore. As Cole told the Lobero crowd before she finally played it for us, it was never really intended to be a teen pop song, but rather “this is a song about my grandfather. It’s about generational trauma. … This is not some light pop song.”  

That may be true enough, but hearing it sung live was still enough to bring us back to a lighter and easier time in our lives.