Customer Reviews

Greatest Hits: Postcards From East Oceanside

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I am not quite sure that three albums really qualifies anyone for a Greatest Hits album, but Paula Cole gets a pass simply for her amazing voice, which is one of my all time favorites. And it turns out she has almost enough excellent music to warrant it on this release, Greatest Hits: Postcards from East Oceanside. It's a nice return for Paula, who has pretty much left the commercial music scene and returned to New York City, to raise her daughter, teach yoga, and write music for herself. And more power to her for doing so.

The album contains her best work, the ghostly beautiful Hush Hush Hush, the jazzy Feelin' Love, the perfect single Where Have All The Cowboys Gone, and the Dawson track, I Don't Want To Wait. In addition to the 14 tracks culled from her three Warner Brothers albums, there are also two new tracks. Tomorrow I Will Be Yours is a standard midtempo elegant love song and Postcards from East Oceanside is a piano based song laced with orchestral strings, and some beautiful singing. The 16 tracks are pulled straight off the originals, it doesn't sound as if the tracks were remastered at all, but overall the sound quality is still good. This record is released by Warner Brothers, and since Paula left the label this was likely a release of her vault of music. So this album is in essence, her swan song as a commercial artist, even if the record wasn't her idea. At least we as fans can still enjoy it. This is an hour and eighteen minutes of pure Paula, and you know what, she still sounds great.

Berklee Music grad Paula Cole burst into the spotlight when her self-produced second album, "This Fire," asked the question "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" Much like Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," Paula observed the situation that her man was miring them in ("I will wash the dishes and you'll go have a beer") and ached to escape. With the advent of "Lilith Fair" artists (Paula was on the first of these tours), she became a standard bearer for women singing about women's issues.

"I Don't Want To Wait" was cut from the same cloth. By being chosen as the theme to the a teen drama on the nascent WB network, her ode to teenagers in puppy-love gave her another hit. She also went deeper with the ballad "Hush Hush Hush." Written as a conversation between a victim of AIDS and his father (sung beautifully by Peter Gabriel), Paula captures perfectly an emotional conflict. It was these songs and the "This Fire" album that brought Paula the best new artist Grammy in 1997.

Despite the fact that her middle album is her best album, she had releases on either side. Her debut, "Harbinger," contains as many great singles as "This Fire" did. The anthem "I Am So Ordinary" is a triumphant description of women trying to break out of their predetermined roles, and should have been a smash. That her first record label went out of business right after "Harbinger's" release is probably what prevented that. The follow-up to "This Fire," the more spiritually based "Amen" is a forthright confessional album that probably was too honest in the dawning of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" pop puff princesses. Paula was not about to make her career into that of a silly poptart and as "Amen" failed to meet the peaks of "This Fire," she quietly left the music scene. (Her appearance with Chis Botti notwithstanding.)

There are two new songs on "Postcards." The melancholy title track is just the kind of song that would have made a perfect teen-drama theme song, and "Tomorrow I Will be Yours" hearkens to the beauty of the songs on "This Fire." The real surprise, however, is the standard "Autumn Leaves." Rescued from "Midnight in The Garden Of Good and Evil" soundtrack obscurity, it is a perfect showcase for the richness of Paula's voice. It is enough for you to long for a full album of standards. Were it to be so. But with a mere three albums of material to pick from, "Postcards From East Oceanside" is a strong collection from a singer-songwriter who deserved a better fate. If you have Annie Lennox, Sara McLaughlin or Natalie Merchant in your collection, Paula Cole's greatest hits will fit in nicely.

Wanna know for whom my love runs deeper than the holler, y'all? Paula Cole, a phenomenal talent that we have shamefully allowed to fall by the wayside. You remember her, yes? Driving the Lilith Fair pace car, she exploded onto the scene not quite ten years ago with a bizarro smash called "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone" that ended up winning her a Best New Artist Grammy. In `99, she followed up with Amen, a deeply introspective record that confounded critics, turned off radio programmers -- who by that time were already enraptured by Britney -- and completely failed to connect with all her fairweather fans, who just shrugged and wondered where all the "Cowboys" went. Humbled by her enormously public failure, Cole pretty much fell off the face of the Earth, and except for a handful of one-off collaborations -- a duet with Dolly Parton for 2001's Sweet November soundtrack, and an uncommonly elegant reading of Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do" for Chris Botti's 2004 breakthrough set When I Fall in Love -- she hasn't been heard from since.

All that's changed now. In June, Warner Brothers released a greatest hits collection, Postcards from East Oceanside, which rounds up all the usual suspects ("Cowboys" of course, as well as "I Don't Want to Wait" and "I Believe in Love," and Cole's original take on "Hush, Hush, Hush" that Annie Lennox forever staked her claim on last year) and includes two new songs: the unremarkable title track, and the deceptively devastating "Tomorrow I Will Be Yours," which covers the same territory -- doomed teenage puppy love -- as a million tunes before it, and seems at first listen to be a fairly peppy, upbeat pop piece. Listen closer: few before Cole (and virtually nobody since) have been as good as she at cultivating the from-the-gut, for-the-gut quasi-wail that is her vocal trademark, and by the time she reaches the obligatory "wonder / if you wonder / still about me" line in the final verse, her voice has hit all points in the spectrum and has taken along for the ride your heart, peacefully enough to fill it and plaintively enough to break it.

I've been a Paula Cole fan ever since I saw her on Peter Gabriel's 'Secret World' DVD, back when I was shocked that she wasn't knocking down the charts with 'Harbinger'. She has so many strong songs in her catalogue that it's no wonder people might be miffed about songs not included in this collection.

I do wish "Oh John", the radio mix of "Be Somebody", and maybe something like "This Fire" or "Garden of Eden", well there are plenty of titles I could mention that could have been on here, but I understand why these tracks were chosen and others were not. This tracklist makes for an excellent and pleasant introducion to Paula's music, a wonderful compilation for a casual fan, and a MUST HAVE for a more dedicated fan like myself.

The two new songs are stunning, Postcards is a gorgeous track, but it's the final chorus of "Tomorrow I Will Be Yours" that blows me away; Paula's voice simply soars and it's incredible!

How many of us have bought a CD just to be bummed that there are only a few songs we enjoy, Or a few fast ones that upset the flow of the mellow ones we had begun to relax to? This one is a relaxing, beautiful, enjoyable experience from begining to end. This has become one of my favorites.

If this is supposed to be a greatest hits album, I'm not sure how "I Want to Be Somebody" and "Pearl" were left off while a couple of lesser-known songs made the cut. (I love all of Paula's songs, but the inclusion of "Saturn Girl" and "Carmen" is hardly what I expected on a greatest hits collection when the other two tracks I mentioned were left out.) The CD also includes three tracks which never appeared on any previous Paula Cole albums. "Autumn Leaves" is a movie soundtrack song from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and shows off her jazz singer talents. It's songs like these that show off Paula's versatility as an artist. "Tomorrow I Will Be Yours" was recorded in 2001, but you could have fooled me. It sounds very much like many of the songs on Harbinger, Paula's first CD, minus the introspectiveness. And I love it. If you're a Paula fan who has all of her CD's to date, this song by itself is reason to buy this CD (even though you already have most of these songs). The final track, "Postcards From East Oceanside" was recorded during the Amen sessions. It's a beautiful song which would have stuck out like a sore thumb on that CD since the concept of the song is very introspective, while "Amen" (the whole CD, not just the song) was anything but that.

I love all the songs here -- of course, I wish "Pearl" or "Oh John" or "Throwing Stones" were also included -- but something about the cover photo and lack of promotion makes me wonder how much Paula had to do with this compilation. Here's hoping she finds a supportive label and puts out another terrific record soon. We miss you, Paula! If you're new to Paula's music, this is a great sampler and the new songs are awesome!

This is a great cd! Her greatest hits plus two more! Paula has been sorely missed, and this cd has all her greatest songs on one CD!

Her greatest hits are a compilation of the many years she has been singing both r/b and songs you really can't classify---
She maintains the pureness of her voice by singing the songs that are just in harmony with it or made for it.

Really good music through the entire CD and I really like listening to each and every song on the CD. Definitely, a good title for any fan of Paula Cole. I do recommend this title to anyone who likes to hear pop music.