Paula Cole Admits She ‘Was Cringing Hard’ While Looking Back at Some of Her Decades-Old Demos for New Album (Exclusive)
Paula Cole Admits She ‘Was Cringing Hard’ While Looking Back at Some of Her Decades-Old Demos for New Album (Exclusive)
Meredith WilshereSun, September 13, 2026 at 8:29 PM UTC
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Paula Cole in 2024.Credit: Rob Kim/Getty -
Paula Cole’s new album, Sonic Memoir: Demos 1989-1998, features 63 songs, including unreleased tracks and early demos
The album reflects Cole’s artistic journey, showcasing her eccentricity and growth before achieving mainstream success
Cole sees the project as a love letter to fans and a tribute to her mentors and younger self
Paula Cole was going through old analog tapes to digitize them following the death of her friend and music mentor Mark Hutchins when she found herself dumbfounded by the sheer amount of music they had created together.
“Sitting with all this music, I just intuitively started culling and listening and taking notes and it formed into this playlist,” Cole, 58, shares with PEOPLE.
Cole says she found over 100 unreleased songs and old demos with over 20 pages of “really extensive” liner notes, and realized it gave her “a chance to tell my story.” So, she decided to make it all into an album.
“It all organically coalesced. It wasn’t a master plan. It was gestational, totally natural,” she says. “Demos are kooky and for those of us who lived pre-digitally, we have to take all of our content and digitize it in order to have that part of our life revealed.”
Paula Cole in 1997Credit: John Atashian/Getty
Cole’s new album, Sonic Memoir: Demos 1989-1998, documents her journey of finding herself and her sound, condensed to 63 songs — from unreleased music to old demos and early versions of some of her biggest hits.
However, she admits going back to old work came with a mix of emotions.
“There are cheesy keyboard sounds from the ‘80s and ‘90s. There are out-of-tune moments that you can’t fix with AutoTune like you can today. It shows the process of an artist,” Cole explains. “This is what you had to do before you had home studios, digital workstations at home. You had to make demos. It was good because it taught me how to self-produce.”
While listening to the decades-old demos, however, Cole admits that “sometimes I was cringing hard.”
“A lot of songs didn’t make it. But overall I was struck by how prolific I was and how eccentric I was. Unfiltered and free,” she says. “This was really before I got songs being played on the radio and I could just be really wildly eccentric. I appreciate that and I want to lean harder into my eccentricity after listening to this.”
“That’s to me the secret to being really unique. But it’s hard listening sometimes because it’s very exploratory and sometimes out of tune,” Cole adds.
Cole says she owes so much to a group of “gentlemen” — from her longtime drummer Jay Bellerose to guitarist Gerry Leonard and Mark Hutchins — that has helped her through the creative process throughout her career.
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“They all really believed in me and helped me make these demos. I owe a lot of gratitude to these incredible gentlemen,” Cole says.
She also feels like this album is a way to give back to a former version of herself, those who helped shape her sound, and ultimately, her fans.
“The songs are like an oral autobiography that tells a lot about my thoughts and who I was through these years,” she says. “If you’re going to get nostalgic, I feel like this was a good way to honor my fans. There are 63 songs. I had to cull it from a hundred songs. Half are songs in demo form that people, especially the core fans, would recognize, but half are totally unreleased tracks.”
The Grammy winner continues, “There’s going to be a lot of content for people who appreciate what I do and are fans. It’s really for them. It’s like a love letter to my fans, really.”
Revisiting something shelved for decades isn’t new for Cole, and she emphasizes that “it’s always a little nerve-wracking and then you get a little postpartum after the release and you just can’t care too much what people think.”
“If you’re going to be in this difficult business, you have to do it for the love of it. You can’t get too caught up with the adulation or the criticism. You need to do it for the love of it and just keep going,” she tells PEOPLE. “I’m talking about it now and I’m promoting it now and I think it’s very creative work and I think it’s for the fans and it tells my story. It really is a memoir. But I’ve already got my eye on my next creative projects.”
“I love that rebel inside of me and it’s really healthy for me to touch upon her again. I also appreciate how I was thinking socially, politically in my writing,” she says. “I’ve always felt it’s a privilege to make music and there’s some kind of social responsibility to it because, yes, it’s therapy for me, but I find out the songs help others too and music helps us all. There is some responsibility in it.”
When revisiting the past version of herself who initially made the demos, Cole shares that she loves “that eccentric person that was really wild and free.”
Paula Cole in 2024Credit: Rob Kim/Getty
She has been inspired by other artists who “understood the responsibility of that and wrote it for at least part of their catalog in a social political vein,” naming people like Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell and John Lennon.
“They’re the greats and they dared to do it and they understood the mantle of responsibility,” Cole shares. “So I don’t want to be pedantic, but there is an element to that, like caring about society and caring about people and animals and Earth. I appreciate that my 20-year-old self was writing not just about her own feelings, but for others, too, and it’s healthy to touch upon that.”
Sonic Memoir: Demos 1989-1998 is out now.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
