Paula Cole - I Don't Want to Wait

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. Song Exploder is sponsored by Gusto. Here at Song Exploder, we're a small team, and now it's become part of my job to handle the tasks that an HR department would normally do: payroll, benefits, onboarding, all that stuff. And figuring out that admin can take up a ton of the time that I wish I were actually spending just making the show. That's why Gusto is so helpful. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Making the switch is quick and easy. You just transfer over your existing data, and you can get up and running fast. Plus, you won't pay anything until you run your first payroll. So try Gusto today at gusto.com/songexploder and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/songexploder. Again, it's gusto.com/songexploder. This episode is brought to you by booking.com. I've been to a few national parks over the years, and it's always been a pretty magical experience. I've been to Yosemite and Joshua Tree here in California. Those are some of the closest ones to me. But I've been wondering about taking a trip to one that's maybe not so close, and last year I started looking at some lists ranking some of the most beautiful national parks, and one that's come up on a few of the lists is Glacier National Park in Montana. Okay, that's the first part of the daydream sorted. The next is where am I gonna stay? So I went on booking.com to look at some options, and they have all kinds of different places to stay. I found a little cottage that looks incredible. It has a mountain view, it has a balcony, it has air conditioning. It has great reviews. I'm very excited about that idea. Or if I decide I wanna bring my dogs with me, I can use the pet friendly filter, and turns out there are some really nice pet friendly hotels on the site too. So go on, book that trip. It's easy. Booking.com. Booking.yeah. This episode contains explicit language. [gentle music] Paula Cole is a singer-songwriter and producer from Massachusetts. She put out her first solo album, Harbinger, in 1994. Her second album, This Fire, came out in 1996 and was a real breakthrough. [upbeat music] She was nominated for seven Grammys, and she won the Grammy for Best New Artist. In fact, that year she was the first woman in Grammy history to be nominated for Producer of the Year without a male collaborator. For this episode, Paula told me about how she made one of the big hits from that album, I Don't Wanna Wait. It spent 56 weeks on the Billboard charts, and then it was heard by millions more when it was used as the theme song for the hit TV show Dawson's Creek. These days, Paula has been reclaiming her old music in various ways. A couple of years ago, she re-recorded some of her songs, including I Don't Wanna Wait, and that's the version of the song that you'll hear throughout this episode and at the end in its