Album Review | ‘Lo’ by Paula Cole
Paula Cole’s 2024 album burns with the same candor and passion that This Fire introduced 27 years prior.
Paula Cole recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of her landmark, grammy award-winning sophomore album This Fire. She hasn’t stopped where this album laid the pavement. Moving outside of the Lilith Fair era that the project lived in, Cole has grown her catalog by finding her style. Since 2008, she has been steadily crafting new works that display her passionate form of songwriting. It has been a little over five years since Paula has graced us with original music. Her prior album, American Quilt (2021), explored traditional folk music through Paula’s lens.
It would be a side project with Nashville Americana powerhouses John Paul White and Jason Isbell in 2023 that would conjure the forces that would ultimately shape Lo:
“I was meeting Jason Isbell and John Paul White in Nashville. I didn’t know them, and we needed a song. [Laughs] So I wrote a couple of songs, then a couple more. It led to some very personal feelings, feelings I don’t think I’d articulated in my life. I realized I needed to have a trust-fall in life. To shed some of the — well, I actually name it in a song — “Invisible Armor.” This protection and defensiveness based on trauma I was carrying…
