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're 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. We want to hear from you about your own experience. Then we'll discuss how a simple dinner party among young people facing loss led to a thriving support group for others to grieve in community.

One of the co-founders, Carla Fernandez, has a new book. It's titled Renegade Grief: 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 Adjepong about his new cookbook inspired by his Ghanaian roots. That's our plan, so let's get this started with Paula Cole.

[music]

Alison Stewart: 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.

[MUSIC - Paula Cole: I Don't Want To Wait]

Alison Stewart: Cole's nominations were great, but the 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 Lo. For another installment of our series, Equalizers: Women in Music Production, I'm joined now by Paula Cole. Hi, Paula.

Paula Cole: Hi, Alison. It's so lovely to see you.

Alison Stewart: It's nice to see you as well. Before This Fire, what kind of production experience had you had?

Paula Cole: Let's see. My boyfriend was an engineer producer. I was a student at Berklee College of Music and I was kind of living in the studios at the time while he was finishing up his degree. I just learned so much from him. We were home-producing demos constantly. I was learning just by doing in Boston. Then we moved to San Francisco where I was prolific in making home demos and those demos got me signed. I never had produced a proper album.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Paula Cole: This is pre-digital. Imagine all the pre-digital nascent technology was such a pain in the ass, all of that stuff. Tape and DATS and ADATS, and it was just constantly changing. I was learning at home. Then I worked with legendary engineer and producer Kevin Killen, who worked with me on my first album, Harbinger. I learned a lot from him. 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.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] What were those conversations like when you said, "I want to produce this record"?

Paula Cole: Oh, hard, because it wasn't going the way I had hoped with Kevin on the second album. I loved him and trusted him, but for some reason, the energies just were not flowing. It was not flowing. I very much wanted this to be a live feeling of an album, like microphones in the room capturing the air molecules moving between instruments. My drummer, Jay Bellerose, who's since gone on to become a legendary drummer because T Bone Burnett discovered him. Jay, we grew up together. I fought hard to bring Jay into the music business. 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 album.

That meant going to Warner Brothers and saying, "I'm so sorry. Let's just throw away $100,000 worth of recorded content, and I want to produce it myself." It meant that I lost my friendship temporarily with Kevin. That was hard. I lost my relationship with the guitar player, Gerry Leonard, too, because they were mates. It was scary. I didn't know if they would give me the time of day. It was so hard. Then they gave me half a budget. They said, "Fine, but you have to finish this within half a budget, no more." That was their way of being-

Alison Stewart: Punitive maybe a little bit.

Paula Cole: -paternal and patron. [laughs] Right. It's 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. Just getting it all under budget was their way of keeping me tempered. It was very difficult. I lost my friendships temporarily, but I delivered. Jay and I, we went in together because we were like soul mates 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 live. That album was live.

Then we had the guitar player, Greg Leisz, come in from LA. He recorded his guitar parts about three and a half days. Tony Levin, literally half a day. I had worked with Tony. He's a bass player that--

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Paula Cole: Yes, incredible. I met him on the Peter Gabriel tour and I always knew I wanted him to play. It was very fast. It had to be because I was under budget deadline. Sometimes brilliance is made with those kinds of constraints. I already knew what the sequence would be. 11 songs. I knew the exact sequence. We recorded track 11 down to track 1. I Don't Want to Wait was the very first. It was the 11th song on the album, but the very first track we cut. It happened quickly.

I realized after all of it that it was when I was given that Grammy nomination for Best Producer, 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 assumed I was hiring them as a producer, except one, Roger Moutino, and he got the gig.

Alison Stewart: Wow. What gave you the confidence to go ahead and produce your own record?

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. I had just stood shoulder to shoulder with student engineers and producers and learned a lot. I trusted my ears and I trusted my intuition. That's something that I still do to this day, and I still stand by it. 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. 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 kind of knew. I knew what I wanted to hear and I knew I needed to take the helm. That was very difficult to do. I think good leaders don't actually want to be leaders. They would rather take a hit for the team. It's like that with me. I'll take a crappy bunk so I can give someone with sleep apnea the star lounge at the back of the bus.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with musician Paula Cole for our March series, Equalizers: 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 Lo. 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.

[MUSIC - Paula Cole: Tiger]

I've left Bethlehem and

I feel free

I've left the girl I was supposed to be and

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 with my legs wide open and

Laugh so loud that the whole damn restaurant

Will turn and look at me

"Look at the tiger jumping out of her mouth"

I've left Bethlehem and

I feel free

I've left the girl I was supposed to be and

Someday I'll be born

Alison Stewart: Paula, when you think back to the time, what was the most audacious production decision you made on This Fire?

Paula Cole: I think Tiger encapsulates a lot of the audaciousness. Especially I encourage the listeners to go listen to the full track. The way it starts, the way it ends, it's a palindrome. It starts as it ends. I use backward vocal. 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've told my students for years and anyone who cares to listen, like, "Embrace your eccentricity. It makes you unique."

I really did. There's odd meter in there. There's a lot of tensions. I play clarinet. The guitar work is like a lot of EBow and sustained textural sounds while the piano drives the rhythm with the drums. Then the bass comes 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. 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 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. From track to track, there was freshness. Sometimes it would be bass-heavy and sometimes it would be light. Sometimes it would be ironic and rye. Most of the time, I'm quite serious, probably to a fault.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to a little bit of Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

[MUSIC - Paula Cole: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?]

One, two, three, four

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 cold lemonade

I will do the laundry

If you pay all the bills

Where is my John Wayne?

Where is my prairie song?

Where is my happy ending?

Where have all the cowboys gone?

Why don't you stay the evening?

Kick back and watch the TV

And I'll fix a little something to eat--

Alison Stewart: My guest is Paula Cole. You're a songwriter and a producer. Are they the same skills, they take the same skills, or what's different about them?

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, thought, or sounds, like what instrumentation do you want the song to be? The producer brain really influences my songwriting. I almost always think of Jay playing drums 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.

My favorite kind of songwriting is highly autobiographical. 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 lives. I love those highly autobiographical songwriters like John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. I think of them as some of the most highly autobiographical songwriters. I love them so dearly for that. Of course, I appreciate third person. Of course, I do. 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.

Alison Stewart: 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, the producer, have to come in. How does a producer approach that?

Paula Cole: I guess that's when I'm a little more detached, like an eagle's perspective looking at the work. I don't know why I can do that. This is all very intuitive process. I grew up with music at such a young age. My dad played polka gigs on weekends. He didn't want me to go into the music business because he knew how hard it was. I was just raised with music as a living language and it's been my primary language. 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 and looking at it from a more macro perspective with production.

I don't know why that's intuitive for me, but it is. Sometimes I've been stuck and I need help. 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. I worked with Bobby Colomby at that phase on my Courage album.

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. If you could see the walls of my room here, I have paper all over the house. This is 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 have-

Alison Stewart: Oh, cool.

Paula Cole: -so much content from the early years. There's so much. When I'm doing a big project, like a musical, I need to get large whiteboard pieces of paper on the wall so I can see it. 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 fields, different signatures, different keys. What's the lyrical story I want to tell with the whole of the album, from the first word to the last? Is there change? Is there topography for the listener to enjoy the ride? Most of all, what is the artist saying? What am I saying? What is the artist saying?

I'm thinking about all of this and I want it to be digestible in an increasingly short attention span world. There's so many aspects that I'm considering when creating an album. It's joyful, actually. I love this work. Just love it.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with musician Paula Cole for our March series, Equalizer: Women in Music Production. You've released Lo last year. You produced it yourself. When you think about what does an-- I think it's your 11th album. Is that right, yes? Your 11th album, something like that. Your latest album that you produced versus your early albums. What's the difference in production?

Paula Cole: With Lo, I wanted to return to live musicians in a room. 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 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 for them, from the kick drum up to the highest vocal, spanning the whole sonic rainbow.

I wanted to be in a good-sounding room. We went to The Village in Los Angeles, which was the room that Fleetwood Mac built after their Rumors success. They built that room for their Tusk album. It sounds beautiful for live recording. 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 just press record on my phone, me at the piano or guitar playing my songs. They conceive of their parts.

We get in the room and we do it. It was very live and spontaneous and intuitive. These are people that I've worked with for years, so I trust them. That's everything. A great engineer capturing. You should see the room mics in the corners of the room. I think air sounds so beautiful. 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. I wanted to return to that with Lo. I had that a bit on Amen.

Often there's budget issues or life issues that impose themselves on albums. 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 Lo is softer. I think I was screaming a lot in my 20s. I still have to perform those songs. It's intense. Channeling that 20-year-old rage again. I do. People love it, but it's harder for me now. I'm in a gentler space.

Alison Stewart: We're going to go out on a song called The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr off your album Lo. Could you set this up for us before we go?

Paula Cole: Oh, absolutely. I'd be happy to. I wrote this for Mark Hutchins. I mentioned him earlier. He was my partner in all things, my boyfriend coming out of Berklee College of Music. He was a music production and engineer major. He taught me so much. He died early at age 51. He has a couple kids. He was working on the Colbert show when he died. I love him. I miss him. He taught me so much. I wouldn't be the producer I am today without Mark. He introduced me to all this awesome early '90s alternative music. I was just honoring him and the music and the process we shared. This is called The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr for Mark Hutchins.

Alison Stewart: Paula Cole, thank you so much for being with us.

Paula Cole: Such a pleasure. Love to talk about it. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Here's The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.

[MUSIC - Paula Cole: The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr]