ABOUT this week’s guest:
Maybe we’re riding the tailwinds of the exciting success of Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields festival, which was directly inspired by Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair, against a backdrop of looming midterm elections with women’s rights and LGBTQ rights on the line. But quite unintentionally, we seem to be on a roll of welcoming some bigtime SHEROES of the 90’s and beyond to our interview spotlight, and we are more than ok with that. This week we follow up our conversation with Melissa Auf der Maur with another guest who has also just released a memoir project, though this one is not a book. The Massachusetts-born singer, songwriter, and producer Paula Cole has excavated, archived, and now released a two volume collection of her earliest demos called SONIC MEMOIR: Demos 1989-1998, which also coincides with her 30th anniversary celebration and tour of her massively successful double platinum, seven time Grammy-nominated second album, This Fire, which was released on October 15th, 1996. If you watched this year’s Lilith Fair documentary, you’ll have Paula Cole fresh in your memory as the first woman to join forces with Sarah McLachlan in a tour that lit the spark to add more women and then create an entire touring festival, despite the argument from industry execs who said that you couldn’t have two women on one concert bill. Less known is the fact that in 1998, Paula was also the first woman to get nominated for a Grammy as Producer of the Year, without a male collaborator. Now with eleven studio albums to her name, and a career that spans over three decades, Paula Cole takes us on a journey back to her beginnings as a young singer at Berklee College of Music, her transition to becoming a singer songwriter, the phone call from Peter Gabriel that changed her life, and using her artform of songwriting to express her emotions, her feminism, and her activism.
CHECK OUT THIS WEEK’S SHEROES RADIO HOUR PLAYLIST ON QOBUZ: