This Fire (album)


This Fire is Paula Cole's second album. According to the RIAA, the album has gone double platinum, selling over 2 million copies in United States and peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard 200 chart. According to the booklet, the album is dedicated to "the inner fire of all life. May our seeds of light open, brighten, and sow peace on earth".
Writing and producing the album herself, she recorded all of it in roughly 2 weeks. Cole released three singles from the album. The first, "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?", peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. The single, "I Don't Want to Wait", peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was used as the theme song for the teen drama Dawson's Creek. The third and final single, "Me", was released in mid-1998 but did not track as well as Cole's prior two singles. The song, "Feelin' Love", was featured on the original motion picture soundtrack to the movie City of Angels.
The album was nominated for seven awards at the 40th Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, Best Pop Album, "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Cole was also nominated for Producer of the Year and Best New Artist, winning the latter.

Critical reception

With the album, Cole was hailed by critics as the leading recording artist of a female-identified rock tradition in the vein of Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Melissa Etheridge, and Sarah McLachlan. Reviewing for Entertainment Weekly in December 1996, Beth Johnson regarded This Fire as a departure from the "sweet safeness" of Cole's debut album, while calling her "a feisty poet with a soaring voice and a funky groove, seems to be nipping at Tori Amos' heels". Online critic Glenn McDonald found Cole's genre of music to be a counterpart of the masculinity of heavy metal music, while Robert Christgau said both genres appear "beholden to 'classical' precepts of musical dexterity and genitalia-to-the-wall expression". Appraising the album as merely a "subpeak" of the female-identified genre, Christgau wrote in The Village Voice: "Where Kate Bush overwhelms petty biases as inexorably as Led Zep, Cole is just a romantic egotist who can't resist turning ordinary human problems into three-act dramas. Kate Bush fans will love her."

Track listing

Personnel

Musicians