Opening acts are the crapshoot of going to concerts. Frequently, you’ve never previously heard of the opener, but the fact they are opening for the headlining act typically means that the headliners like them enough to believe that more people should know about them. I’ve gone to enough concerts over the years to absolutely forget a significant percentage of the ones I’ve seen. Others I remember because they were either awful (to my ears) or in the case of one particular band, they were so aggressively boring that I actually feel asleep in my seat during their set. There were a couple who were the reason I actually went to the concert — 4 Non Blondes and Echobelly — and then there was Paula Cole, who utterly blew me away and inspired me to get their most recent album at the next opportunity.

She was actually one of two opening acts on the evening that Barenaked Ladies performed a show at the former Roseland Ballroom in NYC on New Year’s Eve, 1996. Cannot tell you who the other one was, but Cole left a lasting impression. I don’t recall anything about the success of This Fire or any of its singles at that moment in time, but the energy and raw emotion she displayed that evening made you pay attention. Over thirty years later, I don’t recall any of the rest of her setlist, but there’s no way that “Throwing Stones” — my personal favorite of the This Fire album — Cole didn’t play it that night. The memory of her absolutely pounding the final chords of the song out of the piano combined with the way she almost screamed the final lyrics is just too firmly planted in my memory for it not to have happened. That song alone would’ve made me want to get ahold of it for my music library, but the rest of her performance left no doubt that buying the album was the prudent choice.

Oh, BNL was also spectacular that night. It was my second time seeing them live, and thanks to the concert, it was the closest I have ever been to Times Square when the ball dropped (the Roseland was approximately 10 blocks away.)