Art & Creativity Quote by Paula Cole

Paula Cole is doing something sly here: framing ambiguity not as a failure to “say what she means,” but as the whole point of making pop music that lasts longer than a release cycle. “I’m glad” lands like relief, even defiance - the relief of not being pinned down by interviews, and the defiance of an industry that treats songs like press releases with hooks. She’s naming interpretive openness as an artistic achievement, not a byproduct.

The first sentence is about reach: “interpreted so widely” implies a work that travels across listeners, decades, and personal histories. That’s the quiet flex of a songwriter whose biggest tracks (“Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” especially) were routinely misheard as either a cheeky novelty, an anti-man manifesto, or a straight confession. Cole isn’t correcting the record; she’s protecting the song’s ecosystem. Wide interpretation means the work can be used - for catharsis, argument, nostalgia - without asking permission.

The second sentence, “Art is always interpreted subjectively,” sounds like a truism, but it’s also a boundary. It shifts power away from authorial intent (the endlessly demanded “What is it about?”) and back to the listener’s interior life. In the 90s/early-2000s singer-songwriter lane, women were often treated as diarists whose credibility depended on literal autobiography. Cole’s subtext is: stop cross-examining me. The song isn’t a deposition; it’s a mirror.