Up-and-Coming Singer Knows the Score

Her mother reports that as a child Paula Cole sang before she spoke.

But, oh, what she has to say now.

The 28-year-old singer-songwriter, who gives an all-acoustic show with Sarah McLachlan and Suzanne Vega on Friday at the Starlight Bowl in Burbank, first turned heads two years ago with her aptly named debut, “Harbinger.”

Her songs resonated with the pains of young adulthood, especially when growing up in a small town. In “Bethlehem,” Cole sang: “Now I’m only 16 and I think I have an ulcer/I’m hiding my sex behind a dirty sweatshirt/I’ve lost 5 pounds these past few days/Trying to be class president and get straight A’s.”

“My albums are my working diaries, literally snapshots of my life,” said Cole during a phone interview from her real hometown, Rockport, Mass. “I worked through a lot of pain for this [second] album. It’s definitely pretty dark in spots, pretty angry in spots. I’m a little nervous about putting it out there--but it’s honest.”

In that forthcoming album, “This Fire,” Cole literally--and musically--has moved on. In the opening track, “Tiger,” she sings “I’ve left Bethlehem,” and continues later: “I’m so tired of being shy/I’m not that girl anymore/Not that straight-A anymore/Now I want to sit with my legs wide open/And laugh so loud that the whole damn restaurant will turn and look at me.”

Quite a snapshot. But Cole’s songs are like that, specific in such a way that they convey universal emotions. Some, clearly, are drawn from her own experience. But others aren’t, like “Hush, Hush, Hush,” about the reckoning between a father and son as the latter is dying of AIDS.

“I think empathy is a necessary quality in being an artist--to see the work with eyes of compassion. I tend to feel things very deeply. When I feel anger, it’s deep. When I feel sorrow, it’s deep,” she said. “I’m just lucky I’m an artist, so I can work through my feelings constructively.”

Growing up in Rockport (pop. 7,500), Cole was a local in a summer resort village. Her father taught biology at Salem State College. Her mother gave up her art studies to help her father finish his schooling and raise two daughters. Cole was, indeed, class president--and junior prom queen.

At times things were rough financially (she sings about the fish freezing in their tank in “Bethlehem”), but Cole says her family is far and away her biggest musical influence. “Music, I was taught, is self-made. We rarely listened to the radio.”

Her father, who plays several instruments and once earned extra cash by playing bass in a polka band, would play a blues riff while his daughter improvised. “We’d sing corny songs in three-part harmony. I took great solace in music. I loved it. I knew deep in my heart that it was my destiny.”

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As a senior in high school, Cole latched onto jazz and commuted to Boston to study with Bob Stoloff, a professor of vocal improvisation at Berklee College of Music. Already she was enormously talented, said Stoloff, who continued to teach Cole after she enrolled at Berklee full time.

“As a singer, she was all ready. She had a lot of focus and direction as a stylist. You could hear her just gliding through pop and rock with no problems. She had a beautiful sound and a beautiful vibrato,” he said. “She knew where she was going and what she needed to do.”

Berklee has turned out several successful women singers in recent years--including Melissa Etheridge, Aimee Mann, Julianna Hatfield, Tracy Bonham and Melissa Ferrick--but Steve Prosser, assistant chair of the school’s ear training department, remembers Cole as “one of the best singers I’d heard come through in 15 years.”

That didn’t make her easy to teach. Cole quickly learned that she outpaced other students, Stoloff said, and in fact sang better than most of the college’s faculty at the time. “Headstrong?” said Stoloff. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“She never wore a watch. She would always come to my rehearsals late. I remember yelling at her that if you don’t learn to wear a watch, you’re going to get kicked out of some session,” Stoloff said. “In fact, I gave her a low grade in one of the choirs one semester because I was trying to teach her a lesson. She was pissed. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”

While teachers saw her as a bastion of musical confidence, Cole felt like she was struggling. Jazz improvisation was supposed to be the path to great musical freedom. But it wasn’t coming to her naturally, and she was, ultimately, still singing other people’s songs. She tried to compose her own jazz arrangements, “but it sounded horrible.”

And then, in the midst of this frustration, her own songs came out.

“It was a really terrible time in my life. I was really depressed,” Cole said. “Something literally grabbed me by the collar. . . . Fate was saying, ‘Wake up. This is what you have to do.’ ”

Her efforts earned her the notice of GRP Records, boosting her confidence, but she decided not to sign with them. Instead, she moved to San Francisco and lived like a hermit while writing the songs that eventually became her debut album, “Harbinger.”

The demo tape impressed Terry Ellis, president of Imago Records, but he was still wary. Cole had essentially stopped performing since moving to California, and she seemed young, shy, very quiet. She didn’t, in his view, seem like a performer.

They set up a showcase at Sine, a tiny cafe in Greenwich Village, and Cole prepared to sing her own songs--like the very autobiographical “Bethlehem”--in public for the first time. The diva in Cole emerged.

“Within 30 seconds, I knew what I needed to know,” said Ellis. “She stood up and immediately she opened her mouth and started to sing--and there was a performer. . . . I immediately looked around the room to see if any other record companies were there. My instinct was to say, ‘All right! That’s it! The show is over!’ ”

Imago released “Harbinger” and Cole’s career took off. She replaced Sinead O’Connor on the European leg of Peter Gabriel’s “US” tour. She did her own coffeehouse tour and started opening for the likes of Melissa Etheridge and Sarah McLachlan, even earning a standing ovation for an opening set at the Universal Amphitheatre.

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On stage, Ellis said, Cole is dramatic. She dances. Her voice soars. She slaps out a rhythm on her body. But, she says, when she’s singing, she doesn’t see the snapshots of her songs.

“This might sound odd because people think I’m really into the meaning of the lyrics, but when I’m singing, I’m not,” Cole said. “I know the words and they come out of me like a natural language. But it’s like I’m riding a light beam. It’s a very Zen thing--like you follow something and you stay very focused with it, so you don’t change. And hopefully you don’t get distracted and start thinking about your laundry.”

Cole’s friend and manager, John Carter, calls her “quiet and gentle and some little hippie girl.” He knew her for three years and never saw so much as the calf of her leg exposed. For the cover photo of “This Fire,” due out Sept. 24, she was nude. In the line of creating art, he said, she can be--literally and figuratively--more revealing.

“I think the thing that to me separates her from so many is I really see her as having the ability to reveal a contemporary woman’s consciousness in a way that very few people are doing,” Carter said. “Not that men don’t appreciate what she does, but what she does is especially poignant to a female audience.”

Songs on “This Fire”--which Cole will perform at the Starlight Bowl--burn a wider path than “Harbinger,” from the steamy “Feelin’ Love” to the outwardly hostile “Throwing Stones.” She produced the album herself and has--after a split with her guitarist and boyfriend--started playing the piano in concert.

Cole will start touring again this fall. But in that lull between album production and release, she’s been hanging out with her cats in New York, and spending some time in Rockport--the “Bethlehem” she escaped.

“Every time in the past 10 years, I felt victimized by it’s smallness, almost psychically encroached upon by its nosiness or gossipy qualities,” Cole said. “Now I’m happy on the inside--and if they think I’m weird, that’s OK.”

DETAILS

* WHAT: Paula Cole with Suzanne Vega and Sarah McLachlan.

* WHERE: Starlight Bowl, 1249 Lockheed View Drive, Burbank.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday.

* HOW MUCH: $25.50. Only lawn seating available.

* CALL: Ticketmaster at (213) 480-3232.