Paula Cole - I Don't Want to Wait

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1:19I've been to Yosemite and Joshua Tree here in California. Those are some of the closest ones to me. But I've been wondering about taking a trip to one that's maybe not so close. And last year, I started looking at some lists ranking some of the most beautiful national parks. And one that's come up on a few of the lists is Glacier National Park in Montana. Okay, that's the first part of the daydream sorted. The next is, where am I gonna stay? So I went on booking.com to look at some options. And they have all kinds of different places to stay. I found a little cottage that looks incredible. It has a mountain view.

1:53It has a balcony. It has air conditioning. It has great reviews. I'm very excited about that idea. Or if I decide I want to bring my dogs with me, I can use the pet-friendly filter. And it turns out there are some really nice pet-friendly hotels on the site too. So go on, book that trip. It's easy. Booking.com. Booking.ya. This episode contains explicit language. Paula Cole is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Massachusetts. She put out her first solo album, Harbinger, in 1994. Her second album, This Fire, came out in 1996 and was a real breakthrough. She was nominated for seven Grammys, and she won the Grammy for Best New Artist.

2:39In fact, that year, she was the first woman in Grammy history to be nominated for Producer of the Year without a male collaborator. For this episode, Paula told me about how she made one of the big hits from that album, I Don't Want to Wait. It spent 56 weeks on the Billboard charts. And then it was heard by millions more when it was used as the theme song for the hit TV show Dawson's Creek. These days, Paula has been reclaiming her old music in various ways. A couple of years ago, she re-recorded some of her songs, including I Don't Want to Wait. And that's the version of the song that you'll hear throughout this episode and at the end in its entirety.

3:15And on September 10th, 2026, Paula is putting out an archival collection of her demos. It's called Sonic Memoir, demos 1989 to 1998. It includes the original demo of I Don't Wanna Wait, which you'll also hear in this episode, as Paula tells the story of how she wrote and produced the song.

3:45Sorry

3:51My name is Paula Cole. So it was 1996. I had released my first album, Harbinger, which was well-received critically, and it was important that I follow up with something. My life is changing. I'm touring. I'm singing in coffeehouses for 50 people with my own material, but that's growing. I had like a string of failed relationships. I was 28. So I was just in the throes of being in one's 20s in the 90s in New York City. So that's a shit storm. And I mean, I've lived in the self-help book section. So that's the climate in which I wrote that song. Do you remember what you were specifically thinking about when you started?

4:42I was in a meditative mood, and I was in tune with the feeling that my grandfather was going to pass. I grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts for most of my childhood with grandma and grandpa down the street. And that was incredible. You learn so much about yourself through learning about your family, your history. and my formative years with my grandparents were just those kind of loving times with grandparents. But you notice things, you know, the caution not to ever surprise grandpa and so forth. There were just these stories that slipped out. My grandpa came home from World War II and came home with PTSD changed, but there was no vocabulary there was no real understanding about what he went through or how to deal with it so all of that PTSD just gets buried in a relationship in a marriage and it comes out sideways and it comes out as abuse and it comes in as this cyclical force that then touches generations it touched my father who lived with abuse and then us we lived with abuse and I'm thinking about how I don't want to repeat that.

6:04I don't, with all my heart and soul, I want to try to be conscious and look at my life. And all of that kind of coalesced in this song, precipitated by the feeling that my grandfather was going to die, which he did soon after the writing of the song.

6:24I lived on 15th Street in Chelsea of New York City. It was a townhouse apartment. I had a piano, I had a spinet piano. It's the smallest of the pianos, so it has kind of the smallest sound. But when I moved to New York from San Francisco, I was only playing digital pianos, and I missed an acoustic piano so badly, and I bought this Whirlitzer spinet. That's the only one that would fit up the stairwell, basically. And we had it hoisted up the townhouse stairs to the second floor where my apartment was. And so many songs were born out of that acoustic piano.

7:04Tom Waits says, like, our fingers are like old dogs. They go to the same places. And I try really hard to move my fingers to new places. But I have to say, I love the Black Keys.

7:18So probably my fingers were wandering around that space. And I remember thinking about James Taylor's Fire and Rain and how the bass line is that gorgeous descending major scale, essentially. I've seen fire and I've seen rain I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end And I noticed that in a couple other songs and just how anthemic it makes a chorus when you have that gorgeous descending major scale in the bass line. And I was thinking about the top of a chorus, melodically. How do I want the top of a chorus to just kill, you know? I remember thinking, like, Tina Turner's What's Love Got to Do With It.

8:10That hook of, oh, what's love got to do? You know, the, oh, it's so hooky. And I can be as arty as the next person. and I'm proud of my eccentricities, but I also really love like economical pop writing that just goes for the jugular and hooks you in. And that song is just killer and where her vocal lands. So that's like my more analytical brain kind of entering the flow space of writing. So it's all those things like my hands gravitating towards the black keys, the anthemic bass line, trying to find a killer melodic opening for a chorus and thinking about my grandfather. You know, I Don't Want to Wait was this interesting mixture of all these vectors.

9:05I don't want to wait for our lives to be over I want to know right now what will it be I don't want to wait for our lives to be over

9:31So the initial seeds were laid on my spinet piano. And then I asked Jay Bellerose to come on over, because he's such a beautiful heart, soul, and drummer. Like, oh my gosh. I started playing with Jay when I was 19, and we met at Berklee College of Music. he's one of my primary influences I love him so dearly and he's like my right arm musically and musical soulmate so I'd ask him like can you come on over just want to record some demos get the ideas down I had learned enough to just kind of do some basic mic setup around his drums it was always really important to capture the air around the drums and that's the way Jay plays is like you need to hear the room

10:22We probably like rehearsed it once or twice and then we hit record

10:34It's pretty loose and it's just me and Jay in the apartment living room

10:43We're just finding the song and there's beauty in that freedom of the search.

11:11This being the 90s, and the record companies being what they were, they wanted to hear the songs in demo form before they would pick up their option for album number two and give you the budget to go into a proper studio, right, with a producer and spend all that money. So you had to make demos. And that was the hugest pain in the ass. but now I'm really, really, really grateful for it because I learned how to self-produce and I learned about the process and kind of exercised my musicianship in a more deep way. It made me think about music more creatively, more expansively. It also was amazing because now I own all the masters of those demos and I'm releasing them and they're my masters, which is awesome.

12:03the making of I Don't Want to Wait, coming up after the break.

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15:15So after you made the demo, how did you begin the process for recording the album version of the song? Well, I had a false start in the earlier part of 1996, and I recorded a version of this fire with Kevin Killen and Jerry Leonard. Kevin Killen is a brilliant engineer, producer, And I first heard of Kevin Killen through Peter Gabriel's So album. I asked Kevin to produce my very first album. And Kevin Killen brought Paul Bushnell on bass, and he brought Jerry Leonard on guitar. And Jerry and I began dating, and he moved from Ireland to New York City. And so Kevin was the producer on Harbinger, and it's a very different album.

16:02It's probably the most pristine out of all the recordings I've made. And he's very meticulous in the studio. And so the idea was that Kevin Killen would produce your second album as well? Yes. And we started an incarnation, like the first incarnation of this fire, my second album. But it wasn't feeling right. I didn't feel like it was coming out the way I wanted it to. And don't get me wrong, Kevin Killen, I've learned so much from him and he's so brilliant. I just wanted to make a different kind of record that was sloppier and was more raw. So I had to go to the record company and say, I want to re-record it.

16:43Will you support me if I produce myself? And they did let me, but I had to record the whole album on half a budget. And so that meant my finding tape at cost, everyone getting kind of paid lower salaries probably than they deserved. I was recording in the wee hours of the studio time, you know, after hours. Was that painful? I mean, having had this relationship with the producer on, you know, an album that had gotten you this far to say, no, no, I don't want to work with you. Oh, it's brutal. It's so brutal. I lost my boyfriend and my producer in that decision because they were best mates and both from Ireland.

17:26It's painful to talk about it. But I just, you have to trust your gut. It allowed me the freedom of self-production, the learning, and did it myself.

17:45It was fast. Jay and I, we recorded nine tracks back to front with Roger Moutnow this time. We recorded at the Magic Shop in New York City. Roger Moutnow was like the perfect engineer who got it because he was doing kind of more lo-fi projects like Yola Tango, and he just was coming from the right headspace because I wanted to produce it myself. And all the men that I was interviewing to, like, engineer the album, they would automatically assume that they were taking the producer role because that was the climate at the time. Like, okay, little young girl, I'll pat you on the head. Yes, I'll take the reins now, and I'll be the producer now.

18:25And it was so shocking to me. Like, you're not listening to my words. Like, I've asked you to come to this interview as an engineer. And then finally, Roger Moutonow comes, and he hears my words. And I'm still working with him to this day, because he supports a woman's voice, because he's actually listening. So we went in the studio and just played piano and drums live. Greg Lees flew in from L.A. He recorded all of his guitars in three days. and Tony Levin on bass.

18:59The story of my grandmother is in verse 1. She had two babies. One was six months, one was three. In the war of 44. She had two babies. One was six months, one was three. So that's my father, six months, and one was three. My aunt, in the war of 44. That's setting the stage of my grandfather being in World War II and fighting in the Battle of Okinawa and so forth. And then, oh, would her son grow to know his father? And that was based on a conversation I had with my grandmother. I had been carrying that around for a long time. Oh, would her son grow to know his father? And then moving on to verse 2.

19:45He showed up all wet on the rainy front step wearing shrapnel in his skin. That's the story my grandma told me. Grandpa came home on a rainy day and he showed up at the front door, probably after being in hospitals and he had shrapnel all in his legs. And the war he saw lives inside him still. It's so hard to be gentle and warm. The years passed by and now he has granddaughters. And now he has granddaughters. So that's me. So all of these feelings, like looking at my grandfather in a historical way, a storytelling way, how it affected me, how generational trauma just moves silently through generations subconsciously, I was realizing that I'm having a string of failed relationships.

20:45I want to look at that. I want to learn. I want a meaningful, long-lived relationship. I want a life partner. So I don't want to keep repeating these mistakes, these unexamined cycles of misery. No. I don't want to wait for our lives to be over. I want to know right now what will it be? I don't want to wait for our lives to be over Will it be, yes, so will it be And then the bridge Oh, so breathe a little more deeply, my love All we have is this very moment And I don't want to do what his father and his father and his father did. I want to be here now.

21:49Yeah, his father and his father and his father. That lays out just how generational it is. So it's like the jaws of anger, the jaws of the past, the jaws of our shitty shit in the subconscious that rule us like ghosts. the only way is to kind of be willing to open up that Pandora's box, look at yourself compassionately, do the work, and you start to free up. And you get a little better at your parenting, a little better in your relationship. You have more compassion for people, a little more space. And that's in the intro and the outro. So open up your morning light And say a little prayer for us You know that if we are to stay alive And see the love in every eye If humanity is going to make it, then we must find our empathy for each other, and we must look each other in the eye and see the goodness in each other, see the peace in each other, see the love in every eye.

22:52So that's what I mean by that.

22:57I added a couple overdubs while we were mixing. We were mixing at Looking Glass, which I think was Philip Glass' studio. Roger Moutnow was mixing the track, and I added this little ostinato guitar part, electric guitar part, and I'm not a guitar player really, but I just added that in. It just felt like it needed a little frosting. I said, wait a minute, we need to throw up a vocal microphone in the booth, and I added the do-do-do vocals.

23:38It's a small vocal arrangement.

23:50It gives it like something ethereal and pretty and something that people can sing along to.