After a promising but overlooked debut album, Paula Cole kept the bills paid with a fateful stint as Peter Gabriel´s vocal foil on his 1994 Secret World tour. Gabriel´s immersion in richly theatrical, primal vocals only magnified Cole´s already fevered attack; it´s obvious that his sense of adventure as a producer and writer also struck conceptual sparks with the Massachusetts singer-songwriter. This Fire, Cole´s self-produced 1996 breakthrough, finds her investing her songs with outsized emotions, framed by consistently inventive arrangements built around Cole´s keyboards, and reaching a zeitgeist-piercing intensity on "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" and "I Don´t Want to Wait," making Cole seem very much like Fiona Apple´s older, slightly less cracked sister.