This Fire
After a promising but overlooked debut album, Paula Cole kept the bills paid with a fateful stint as Peter Gabriel's vocal foil on his 1994Secret Worldtour. Gabriel's immersion in richly theatrical, primal vocals only magnified Cole's already fevered attack; it's obvious that his sense of adventure as a producer and writer also struck conceptual sparks with the Massachusetts singer-songwriter.This Fire, Cole's self-produced 1996 breakthrough, finds her investing her songs with outsized emotions, framed by consistently inventive arrangements built around Cole's keyboards, and reaching a zeitgeist-piercing intensity on "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" and "I Don't Want to Wait," making Cole seem very much like Fiona Apple's older, slightly less cracked sister.--Sam Sutherland