Thirty years ago this summer, Paula Cole released “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”
It’s one of those songs that escaped into the culture, a defining singer-songwriter statement of the 1990s. It launched her career, and entered the common conversation.
Before she was a pioneering voice of the Lilith Fair generation, won Best New Artist at the Grammys, and was featured on Dawson's Creek, Paula Cole studied jazz at Berklee College of Music. She sang standards, immersed herself in harmony, and even turned down an early opportunity with the more jazz oriented GRP Records because she didn't think it reflected who she was as an artist. That independence would become one of the crucial characteristics of her career.
Three decades after her initial success, Paula is still having her own conversation with that moment and the music that introduced her to the world.
“Cowboys” didn't sound like anything else on the radio. Part of that was due to the way she produced it, and the patience she took with it until she found the right approach. It was a song that waited for years to eventually show up right on time. Thirty years later, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” still resists easy explanation. And it still sounds like itself.
Hear my full Third Story podcast conversation with Paula Cole here.
