Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

In this song, Paula Cole plays a woman who is swept off her feet by a rugged cowboy in a '56 Chevy. She's happy to be his housewife while he provides for the family, but after a while lethargy sets in and her cowboy is more of a bum, hanging out at the bar while she takes care of the household. In a Songfacts interview with Cole, she said: "It's so many things woven together: wit, irony, humor, melancholy, and gender role examination. It's all these things put together musically in this plaintive, Americana pop way."

Cole is a staunch feminist and wrote this song with a sideways glance at gender stereotypes. The nuance of the song was lost on many listeners, who thought it was simply about a woman yearning for a manly man to take care of her.

"Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" was the breakout hit from Cole's second album, which she wrote and produced herself after working with Kevin Killen on her 1994 debut, Harbinger. She wrote the song and demoed it with a rumba feel, but that didn't fly. "Nobody paid any attention to it with a rumba feel, and that bothered me," Cole told Songfacts. "For some reason the song was speaking to my unconscious and was saying, 'Believe in me. Hey, I'm down here, I'm good.' It bothered me enough that I re-demoed it with like a Ringo Starr reprise of 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' On that album, Paul McCartney counts off at the last song, 'One, two, three, four... [drum beat].' That's Ringo. So, I sampled Ringo and looped it for just home demo purposes, not for the recording, and then I put on the catchy BVs [backing vocals] and added a bridge and suddenly everyone was really over the top about the song. And I knew going into This Fire that it was an important song and it was probably going to be my first single. I loved the way "When Doves Cry" sounded, from Prince, and the lack of bass and how it sounded coming through a piece of s--t car stereo system all high end. It translated beautifully. I wanted it to translate to radio without bass muddying this particular song. I wanted crowd noise throughout the track to give it feel and ambience. I wanted the catchiness of the background vocals, and most of all I wanted humor and wit, like XTC of England, that wonderful British rock group. I was really in admiration of their wit and their humor and I thought, 'What do I need to write with some wit and humor and irony.'"