Start with the flute. Cally Cole picked one up as a kid in Loretto, Minnesota, and didn't put it down for seventeen years — long enough that the instrument rewired how she hears everything. You can catch it in her singing the way you can hear a sculptor in a sentence: the careful breath, the phrase that resolves a beat later than you expect, the sense that every note has been weighed. By the time she landed in New Orleans, the training had become instinct. She wasn't a flautist who also sang. She was a musician, full stop, and a formidable one.
That's the woman who took the candlelit room at Loa this past Wednesday for the Singer Songwriters of NOLA's Lilith in LOA — and she'd arguably been rehearsing for a room like this since before she knew it existed.
Cole's résumé reads like a map of how a person becomes a real songwriter. Childhood harmonies sung alongside her sister at their father's gigs. Four years in a Motown and soft-rock cover band, the kind of apprenticeship that teaches you what a melody is actually for. Roots dug deep into folk, Americana and classical all at once. And then four years here as a studio vocalist, lending her voice to other people's compositions until her own command of it became something close to total. She is, by any honest measure, one of the more quietly gifted singers working this city's rooms.
What she's done with all that craft is turn it inward. Cole writes in a kind of stream of consciousness — closer to poetry than to verse-chorus-verse — songs that pick at the ordinary work of making sense of a chaotic life and keep finding the tender spot underneath. Her solo material leans folk and indie pop, but the genre tags undersell it. The through-line is a writer with a poet's instinct for the unguarded line and a vocalist who knows exactly how little pressure it takes to break your heart.
A series like Lilith in LOA exists precisely to give that kind of artist the right frame. Built by Sean Cummings and held every other Wednesday in Loa's low glow — warm incandescent bulbs, candlelight, the bar named for the Vodou spirits two blocks off the French Quarter — it follows the thread of the Laurel Canyon women, the Joni Mitchells and Carole Kings who proved a quiet room could hold the whole weight of a culture. Host Molly Graham keeps the lineage honest, handing the candlelight each week to another New Orleans woman with songs of her own. On Wednesday, she handed it to one who was more than ready for it.
Cole filled the slot with originals delivered in those weighed, deliberate phrases, folded in so naturally you'd have missed the switch if you weren't watching — every one of them proof that the most talented person in a room is often the one making the least noise about it.
Lilith in LOA runs every other Wednesday at Loa inside the International House Hotel, 221 Camp Street. Admission is free.
