Paula Cole
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and producer Paula Cole will release Lo, her first collection of entirely new, original songs in nearly a decade, on March 1, 2024. Today, Paula shares the first single from the album, “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.” – a heartfelt tribute to her friend and artistic mentor, Mark Hutchins, who left us too soon, aged 51. The song pays homage to Hutchins’ musical influences, spanning from The Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. to The Beatles, XTC, Daniel Lanois, and A Tribe Called Quest. This song, like the forthcoming album, beautifully blends vulnerability with joy, staying true to Paula’s signature authentic and soul-stirring style.
Paula recalls, “Mark exploded my mind. I literally heard the Beatles first with Mark. Also The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., A Tribe Called Quest, The Pixies, and a lot of gorgeous early-90’s alternative music folks might not associate with me. We connected in our love for Peter Gabriel’s music. I was mourning, honoring, celebrating Mark when I wrote this. I wanted to acknowledge him and his lasting influence in my life. Mark should have had an enormous career. I’m so grateful. The song needed to be fun, like he was.”
The album features longtime Cole collaborator Jay Bellerose (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John) on drums, plus Ross Gallagher (Joe Henry, Marc Ribot) on upright bass, Chris Bruce (Meshell Ndegeocello, Bettye LaVette, Tom Waits) on guitar, and Rich Hinman (Maren Morris, Sara Bareilles) on pedal steel and guitar. The album was produced by Cole and recorded at The Village recording studio in Los Angeles by nine time Grammy-winning engineer, Mike Piersante.
Paula has also announced an extensive US tour which will kick off April 11 in Chicago, and feature many of the musicians who perform on Lo in her backing band.
A truth-teller, provocateur, feminist, and brilliant autobiographical writer who has pushed for personal honesty and social change, Cole wrote all the songs on Lo, as a way to navigate her opening to trust again after life’s indelible blows. Weaving the personal with the universal, she wrestles with questions of identity and intimacy, history and our collective failure to learn from it, ultimately showing the album to be a window into her own psyche.
Paula Cole is a Best New Artist Grammy-winner and was the first woman nominated in her own right for a Grammy for “Producer of the Year.” She has in recent years honored her love for jazz and folk standards, and songs for social justice with her releases ‘Ballads’, ‘American Quilt’ and ‘Revolution’ for which NPR called her a “boundary-pushing feminist trailblazer,” for having “long incorporated powerful social statements into her emotional hit songs.” Her beloved anthems “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” and “I Don’t Want to Wait” are still playlist and radio perennials.
This show is part of the July 11 ticketed program presented by C95 at Victoria Park.