I Don't Want To Wait by Paula Cole

photo taken from Amazon

It was because of the teenage series Dawson's Creek that I found out about my role model Paula Cole. "I don't want to wait" did not only become the hymn of my favourite series, but soon also my obsession. I was covering that song and it was part of many gigs I have been doing in my early music "career". Still today, people call me up, saying: "Hey, I just listened to 'I don't want to wait' by Paula Cole on the radio and I could not help but think of you. So how are you doing?"

The song is best known as the opening theme of the teenage series Dawsons’s Creek. Thanks to this the second release of the Album This Fire became a #11 pop hit single in 1997.

The text is a homage to carpe diem. The message is to live in the present and not in the past. You should not look back as life is too short to live in the past and think about every step you take.

"I don't want to wait" starts with the singer’s appeal to “open up your morning light and say a little prayer” for her. The use of piano chords makes the beginning very gentle.

The mood of the song then changes, when the drums start to play a forward pushing rhythm. Paula Cole paints a picture of a woman in 1944, waiting for her husband to come home from the front. She is using a monotonous melody to keep the verse in a story-telling style.

This then leads to the chorus that has a carpe diem theme: “I don’t want to wait, for our lives to be over.” To emphasize the change, the singer uses her head-voice, which shows more emotions than the verse.

The second verse is coming back to the illustration, telling the listener what happens when people wait: The man has returned from war – as a grandfather- , but the war still lives inside him, which makes it so hard “to be gentle and warm”. The chorus starts off again, telling you that you are better off not waiting.

Suddenly the mood changes completely and the use of blue notes portrays anger. That is typical of Paula Cole, as she is not afraid to sing “badly” to show her emotions. Paula Cole’s music is sometimes not nice and gentle, but hard and ugly, because her music always goes with the lyrics.

Her music is often not easy to listen to. Especially her newest album is more jazzy and a bit twisted. This makes her work really arty, which is probably why that artist is only known as the woman who wrote the Dawson's creek theme.

"I don't want to wait" is an exception. Apart from the few blue notes and the anger in the middle of the song, the melody is simple and it is easy to listen to. The art here lies more in the lyrics and the structure of the song. It might be one of Paula's easiest songs, but the structure is brilliantly thought-out.

The music video is sophisticated as well. It features Paula Cole as the story-teller in the beginning and then continues showing her in different times with different men. All men die. Pictured as an immortal creature, the protagonist has enough authority to give the advise to seize the day to their listeners as she has lost so many loved ones. She experienced that everthing has to come to an end and knows about the importance to live a life, instead of thinking about it.