Holly Cole has the Beatles to thank for the first mainstream hit of her decade-long career.
Despite a dedicated fan base that reaches far outside her native Toronto -- Japan is tied with Canada as her best market -- Cole had been relegated to the radio hinterland as a psuedo-jazz interpreter.
"The grassroots kind of support is what's kept me going," said Cole on the phone from her Toronto home.
"The hype machine has never really worked for me, or I've never really tried to make it work for me."
Cole, however, finally struck airplay gold with her nifty cover of I've Just Seen A Face, the first single off her recently released, pop-leaning album, Dark, Dear Heart, produced by Grammy winner Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Shawn Colvin).
"I was like, 'Wait a minute. Someone pinch me please.' This is not what I'm used to," said Cole.
"I'm used to the record company going, 'Please, please play it.' I'm talking about mainstream radio right now. CBC has been with us all down the line, and so has student radio. But apart from that, all mainstream radio says is, 'Oh, it's great, we love it, but it's not for our format.' "
Some critics might say choosing a tune by the Fab Four is the easy way to a surefire hit and Cole, who is bypassing her traditional Christmas concerts this year in favor of a full Canadian tour in February, says she definitely hesitated.
Ultimately it was a sentimental decision. I've Just Seen A Face mirrors the story that lead up to Cole meeting her current love.
"That was my decision to do that song. Actually it was based on kind of a real-life experience that I've had in the last year. It has to do with my love life and how I met the person. It's kind of literal and in the lyric you've got the whole story."
Speaking of relationships, Cole also chose to cover River, a song by Klein's ex-wife Joni Mitchell.
"That was just a coincidence, and a funny one too because they were divorcing as we made this record," said Cole, who is also taking part in a special Lilith Fair date in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 16.
"But it was an unusually amicable divorce. They'd been separated for years and they were just actually doing the physical divorcing. But they're very, very close friends and he had no problem doing her material."
The smoky-voiced Cole is sounding groggy, having just returned from a two-and-a-half week Japanese tour -- her sixth. "I'm in total zig-zag of jet lag now," said Cole, who had visited Japan just two weeks before the tour doing promotion for Dark, Dear Heart.
"They're so incredibly polite," she said of the Japanese. "They just clap for two seconds and stop. They don't exactly hoot and holler and things like that. So it's a bit of a different feeling. But they're so attentive, it's great. Like they listen to every tiny little thing that's happpening."
Which means they would have to be deaf not to have picked up on the change in Cole's sound on Dark, Dear Heart -- a collection of mostly previously unrecorded tunes by contemporary songwriters. The composer list includes Sheryl Crow and Toronto's own Mary Margaret O'Hara.
In addition, Cole experiments with her voice and there's a layered pop sound, with longtime keyboardist Aaron Davis playing a Hammond B-3 organ and a Wurlitzer piano.
"It's definitely more of a pop direction," said Cole. "It's still a real hybrid of styles. To me, it's not that radically different from what we have done -- this sort of collage of country, R&B, jazz, soul, blues."
Cole said the scariest thing was simply allowing Klein to do his job.
"I've never done that before," she said. "I'm kind of a control freak. And with Aaron and Dave, the three of us together, we always made the decisions, did the arrangements. And we still did on this record but I let Larry do some stuff too. There's drum programming. I never would have allowed loops or programs or anything on a record because I didn't like me and them together. I just had to sort of get over it."
