Aural Robert

Discovering music as it is being recorded—singer Holly Cole seeks that kind of spontaneity on her recordings including her latest, Dark Moon on Rumpus Room/UMG Records. As she put it, she wanted this record with her longtime quartet to capture "the moment when the light turns on for us."

"On Dark Moon, you hear the essence of when we discover a song," she said during a recent interview. "We had very brief rehearsals, and then went in and recorded. I had a lot of faith in this band, and that's why I cherry-picked them. They know me, they know I'm a minimalist, and we were able to arrange in the studio. Some of the tracks are first takes. The more complex the arrangement, the longer it took. They are all three, four takes at the most. People have to be hard listeners in this band, or it will fail. That's the case on Temptation, and that's on this record."

Temptation, Cole's 1995 recording of covers of Tom Waits songs, remains her best-known project, particularly among listeners for whom the sound is a major consideration. It was reissued in audiophile editions by Classic Records (2001) and Analogue Productions (200gm on vinyl in 2018, then at 45rpm in 2021). Few people other than Cole have attempted reimagining Waits, and none has succeeded so spectacularly, especially on his wonderful love dirge "Jersey Girl."

Along with cherishing spontaneity in her music, Cole is also that rare musician who can talk microphones.

"Anyone who brings a [Neumann] U67 into the studio, I'm happy with," she told me. "I really love that microphone, and I don't want to hear about all these other shimmering ones. Jeff Wolpert, who worked on Dark Moon, was the engineer on my first EP. He knows that I want my voice to sound warm. I want it to sound natural. And I like the bottom end of my voice most, and he knows to bring that out. I like the mikes that make you sound like you sound, and if you don't like that, you have to fix it yourself."

Cole has used the time since 2018's Holly, her most recent full-length studio album, to collect the group of songs that became Dark Moon. Guided by instinct, she looks for tunes she sees things in that other artists overlook.

"The way songs appeal to me is that I hear a subtext or something different than where the emphasis usually is. Even as a child, I would listen to songs and I would think, that's actually about this. Maybe there's a slightly darker vibe going on within the text. Maybe it's slightly funnier, lighter, sadder, or whatever. It's not necessarily making the song about something else. But there can be another thing implied that might mean something totally different to me than it means to you."

Cole's ability to find new meaning or fresh perspective on songs is beautifully on display in a pair of covers from Dark Moon, which in the hands of lesser interpreters could spell blah, pedestrian, or outright disaster. In her reading of "Walk Away Renee," best known from the 1966 original version by The Left Banke, the mood is "pretty, sad, and poignant. And it's not complex, but it doesn't need to be. And I like that about it so much. It's really just a vignette."

More challenging is "Message to Michael" by the late master Burt Bacharach. "That might be my favorite on the record," she explains. "The song has so many idiosyncratic things, musically and lyrically. And it's such a great narrative. I like the fact that the genders are kind of inverted. One would often think, maybe in a sexist way, that it would be a woman who would be trying to get famous, and in this case it's a man, and the woman is perturbed by it. That's a twist."

Cole has spent a career marching—rather, singing—to the beat of her own drummer. Categorized perhaps unfairly as a jazz singer, she has always had a more expansive vision of her art than exploring jazz standards and the musical environs of Tin Pan Alley. Dark Moon is built, evidently by luck more than planning, around the romance and power of the moon. Near the album's center are three songs with "moon" in the title, beginning with Henry Mancini's timeless "Moon River" from the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. That's followed by "No Moon at All," best known in a version by Julie London. Finally, there's "Dark Moon," first covered in 1957 by country singer Bonnie Guitar (née Bonnie Buckingham) and later by an unlikely mix of singers including Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, Gale Storm, and Chris Isaak.

"I was surprised at how many moon songs there are," she concludes, "but I shouldn't be, because I'm a night person. A night owl. Like crazy. I have been since I was a child. I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and little kids get this disease called the croup. I used to get it fairly frequently.

"It would be three or four in the morning, and my dad would put me on his shoulders and walk around our neighborhood. There was nobody there except the two of us, and it was silent. I can still hear his footsteps on the pavement. All the places I would play in the daytime were vacant. It was like a secret I had. We'd go back to the house, and I would be tired, but I'd also be cleansed from the clean, moist Halifax harbor air and the moonlight. The magic and mystery were so alluring. It's stayed with me forever. The moon has always been a big influence on my creativity. The moon is the star at night."