Paula Cole -- Ithaca (2010) (Harrison Reviews 2015 #77)
Few musicians in my collection have been so revelatory, and then so disappointing, as Paula Cole. Paula Cole made her way into my rotation at a time when I hadn't yet discovered Aimee Mann, or Janis Ian, or Bic Runga, or Joni Mitchell or Shawn Colvin or Dar Williams or any of the other brilliant women whose work I've had the opportunity to listen to over the last several years. I wasn't actively avoiding female singer/songwriters--I just hadn't found the ones that worked for me. In that context Cole's commercial breakthrough This Fire (1996) rocked my world. The album was comprised of wonderfully crafted songs teeming with a visceral anger that made for an absorbing and emotional experience. It was one of the best albums I heard that year, whatever year it happened to be. Nothing I've heard from Cole since has lived up to that. Harbinger (1994) and Courage (2007) were just dull, featuring Cole's beautiful voice but almost nothing in the way of melodic hooks. Amen. (1999) was better, but marred by a weird amount of cultural appropriation that made the listen at times genuinely uncomfortable. My memories of This Fire have kept me buying, but as I started my listen of Cole's 2010 album Ithaca, I knew the odds were good that this would be the last Paula Cole album I ever heard. But now I hope very much that it's not, because Ithaca is great. The album kicks off with "The Hard Way," a song that begins with Cole on solo piano. Her playing here is beautiful, and a clear reminder of what I've found easy to forget: that Cole, while having a stunner of voice, is really an impressively well-rounded musician, and substantially better on the piano than most talented songwriters are on anything. But then the drums kick in, and "The Hard Way" takes on an anger reflected very quickly in Cole's vocals. The verses lead into a soaring, harmonic chorus, with a serious emotional tug that carries through the entire composition, especially with the key change toward the end. "The Hard Way" is autobiographical, or at least it seems to be, detailing the experience of Cole's divorce. This reflects the album as a whole. I don't know how much of it describes Cole's life exactly--some of the songs were written pre-divorce, I think--but collectively they create a clear and tangible song cycle, carrying Cole from the pain and anger of the divorce through to the discovery of both new love and self-love. I love albums that are more than collections of songs, but in fact emotional journeys--concept albums, really--and this is very much the territory Ithaca occupies. Cole seems energized by this--the music has a vibrancy that hasn't appeared in her work since This Fire, and it makes Ithaca perpetually compelling. The best songs here are those that occupy the first half and address the divorce most directly. The soulful 6/8 "Waiting on a Miracle" runs a bit off-track lyrically by removing the focus from Cole herself in a way that recalls the problems of Amen. ("You can take the boy from the ghetto, but the ghetto from the boy?"), but the music itself weaves a subtle and effective hook. The guitar-driven "Music in Me" is better, with Cole singing passionately about the music helping her survive this experience. The song features one of Cole's best choruses, and one of the great things about a voice like Cole's is that it can not only match, but surpass the music in conveying pain and joy and everything in-between. When Cole is able to utilize every tool in her repertoire she's capable of some amazing things. She's also quite capable of exploring this experience from different angles. On the contemplative side, there's "Elegy," played with some very interesting start-and-stop piano as Cole sings about being a single mother too busy keeping everything together to deal with the pain she's feeling. As a lyricist Cole is often clumsy--subtle she's not--but even so she has some very interesting things to say about the complexity of this sort of experience, and between that and the electric instrumentation that emerges in the haunting bridge "Elegy" is outright enrapturing. But on the other hand there's "P.R.E.N.U.P.," a fun little song playing on the classic "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." lyric from Aretha Franklin's "Respect." With jazz in the choruses and banjo in the verses, "P.R.E.N.U.P." is a standout, strong and self-affirming. I like these songs not only on their own merits, but because they remind me very much of the recent and present struggles of a friend of mine. But Ithaca, like I said, is a song cycle, and that means the mood changes over time. "Come On Inside"--again, as a lyricist, Cole is not subtle--begins the process of introducing a new love, and while that song is a very good pop number, "Violet Eyes" is the best track in this part of the album. Featuring a string quartet, "Violet Eyes" is about the experience of finding love again, and it's a song that feels striking and personal. There are a lot of really good choruses on this album, and "Violet Eyes" includes one of the best. Really, there's nothing on this album that doesn't work. Even the jazzy eight-minute "Sex" is strong--and very very good at delivering the atmosphere it aims for. Ahem. And when the album closes with "2 Lifetimes," another song making use of the string quartet, it feels very much like the end of a story. The anger of "The Hard Way" has been replaced by the understanding that life goes on after pain. It's a great way--indeed, a beautiful way--to end one of the most absorbing albums I've heard this year. Ithaca is without question the best Paula Cole album since This Fire. Indeed, it may be the best Paula Cole album of all. It's the album I've been looking for these last several years, and what makes it work is that Cole has again managed to marry her emotions and her craft. I don't want this to be the last Paula Cole album I hear, but I fear it might be. Her next two albums, one crowd-sourced with likely limited distribution and the other maybe digital-only, may be difficult to find. When a musician has a hit we assume sometimes a lifetime of financial security, but my sense is that Cole, despite her prominence in the mid to late nineties, is at this point an indie musician of modest means continuing to do what she loves. If what she loves can maintain the kind of quality we see on Ithaca, I hope there's a lot more of it and I hope I'm able to find it. I highly recommend this one. "The Hard Way":












