Paula Cole recalls how her biggest '90s hit was misunderstood: 'It was horrific'
Twenty-five years ago, singer-songwriter Paula Cole released her sophomore album and major-label debut, This Fire, which spawned the perennial future Dawson’s Creek anthem “I Don’t Want to Wait” and the top 10 hit “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” The latter was Cole’s breakthrough single and was nominated for Record and Song of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 1998 Grammys, but not everyone appreciated its irony or subtext. Cole, a staunch feminist, intended the moody tune — about a disillusioned, barefoot-and-pregnant housewife and her no-good cowboy husband — to be a social commentary on traditional gender stereotypes. But that message was lost on many listeners (including conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh!), who mistook it to be about a woman literally yearning for a macho Marlboro Man-type hero to come rescue her.
“Oh, yes. And they still [believe] that — there's still those folks holding out!” Cole laughingly tells Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume. “It was so bizarre. You put out a piece of work and you know what it means, but then you let it go out into the world and it's like witnessing, I don't know, like an anthropological study. You learn about people. It was one of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite songs; he’d play it on his radio station! In some ways, it was horrific. … In the moment, it was galling. I remember even though Spin magazine had been supportive of me, they didn't get it. One of the writers wrote that I was the ‘Tammy Wynette of Lilith Fair.’ And it was so the opposite — I was actually one of the most outspoken feminist dark horses on that whole stage.”
Cole explains that she was listening to a lot of British new wave band XTC at the time of the song’s creation. “Their writing is so funny and smart and clever, and I thought to myself, ‘I want to write something clever and turn it on its head.’ There's irony woven in, there's melancholia woven in, but from a woman's point of view. So, it really was like a gender-role wink-wink- nudge-nudge kind of laugh, kind of an examination of our society with some sadness, and with a little bit of a country song in there too. … And then you blend it all together and there's this conversation and there's this learning — and confusion.”
Cole notes that “all the feminists got it” then and now (she’s very proud that indie-rock sister trio HAIM covered “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” in 2019), and that the song’s nuances were always better grasped by international audiences. “Another observation is that America has the fundamentalist, puritanical approach to things, but when I went to Europe, they so got it,” she recalls. “I remember in Spain especially, they loved the irony and the laughter — like, the ‘shiny gun’ is a phallic reference, totally tongue-in-cheek. Whereas this ‘shiny gun,’ America didn't get that.”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/paula-cole-recalls-how-her-biggest-90-s-hit-was-misunderstood-it-was-horrific-184814249.html
I knew the song was tongue in cheek and I'm a guy.
= new reply since forum marked as read
as everyone already knows.
Love her cowboys song. 
It's used for patio furniture and mattress sales on the 4th of July! 
