HOLLY COLE

To Holly Cole, the nighttime is central to her personal and artistic life. She is a self-declared night owl, perfectly at home in the time between dusk and dawn, a dear friend of the wee small hours. It’s a fact that now finds firm and poetic expression in the title and content of her eagerly awaited new album – NIGHT. As usual when it comes to the iconic Canadian songstress, it’s an album that features a stylistically diverse and emotionally stirring collection of songs. It stands as a love letter to the night and its power, a celebration of the hours where daylight’s chatter has disappeared and turned into peaceful moments of creative possibility, providing a chance to see the world with different eyes and to listen with different ears. An invitation to intimacy. This is not the first time Holly Cole has decided to present a theme-oriented album to her audience. Romantically Helpless discussed the ins and outs of romantic love, Shade was all about situations of heat and summer, Baby, It’s Cold Outside talked about wintery feelings and the spirit of Christmas. Ever since Frank Sinatra presented thematically inclined albums to his fans in the 1950s, the idea of having an overriding theme embrace a collection of songs to give them enhanced meaning, has found practitioners and fans in both jazz and pop. Holly Cole is one of the artists not adverse to be inspired by concepts of mood and emotion, but she lets the songs lead the way. Consequently, the current topic was suggested by her repertoire yet again – not vice versa. So it’s the music that creates themes and while working it up in the studio, new discoveries can be made. In this case the distinct and mysterious allure of nocturnal situations.