"If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better"
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Paula Cole frames music less as a career choice than as a pressure valve for a certain kind of mind: curious, analytical, and easily trapped by questions that don’t resolve. The throwaway image of the “frustrated scientist” does a lot of work. It signals discipline and rigor, but also the emotional cost of living inside experiments, proofs, and partial answers. Science, in this telling, is the noble method that still leaves you staring at the biggest problem set of all: why any of this matters.
Her pivot to “the meaning of life” is deliberately unglamorous. She doesn’t romanticize music as salvation; she positions it as an alternative epistemology. Music “answers” not by supplying facts but by creating a felt coherence, a temporary sense that experience hangs together. That’s the subtext: the meaning we can actually live with is often the meaning we can sense in our bodies, not the one we can defend in a seminar.
Coming from a 1990s singer-songwriter associated with confession, intimacy, and an era when women’s interiority was both commodified and contested, the line also pushes back against the demand that artistic work justify itself in utilitarian terms. Cole’s claim is bluntly anti-productivity: music is valuable because it metabolizes existential doubt into something shareable. The better answer isn’t the cleverest argument; it’s the one that makes you feel less alone while the question remains.
Her pivot to “the meaning of life” is deliberately unglamorous. She doesn’t romanticize music as salvation; she positions it as an alternative epistemology. Music “answers” not by supplying facts but by creating a felt coherence, a temporary sense that experience hangs together. That’s the subtext: the meaning we can actually live with is often the meaning we can sense in our bodies, not the one we can defend in a seminar.
Coming from a 1990s singer-songwriter associated with confession, intimacy, and an era when women’s interiority was both commodified and contested, the line also pushes back against the demand that artistic work justify itself in utilitarian terms. Cole’s claim is bluntly anti-productivity: music is valuable because it metabolizes existential doubt into something shareable. The better answer isn’t the cleverest argument; it’s the one that makes you feel less alone while the question remains.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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