Randy Cordova
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 14, 2002 12:00 AM
Eager fans have snapped up more than a million copies of piano pounder Vanessa Carlton's debut album.
Actually, the big-selling Be Not Nobody became the 21-year-old's first album by default. She recorded another disc that was shelved by her record company.
"I definitely went through trial and error," Carlton says. "I was kind of on this crash course, and I learned you just don't write the songs and hand them over to someone else and make the record."
She doesn't sound too disappointed about recording a complete album that her fans never will hear.
"It was just a big education for me," she says. "I wasn't really ready anyway, and I was working on something that wasn't going to see the light of day."
But knowing the way record companies work these days, isn't there a chance that A&M could include tracks from the unheard disc on some Vanessa Carlton Anthology in the year 2012?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Find the CD:
"If there is gonna be an anthology, I'm gonna be in charge of putting it together," she says firmly.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OK, this is a woman who obviously knows her own mind. She has unwavering ideas about how she wants to sound and look.
"I've got a quirky taste and style," she says. "I kind of say to everyone around me, 'If you want me to perform at my best and feel my best, I need to feel comfortable about what I'm portraying.' They totally understand it."
Musically, the Pennsylvania-born singer emerges as a florid pop queen whose songs are enhanced with melodramatic piano licks, as in the sweeping hits A Thousand Miles and Ordinary Day. Think of Tori Amos without the eccentricities.
Comparisons are nothing new for Carlton, who has been likened to everyone from angst-ridden Avril Lavigne to bubble-gum queen Michelle Branch.
"I think those girls being successful has helped me," Carlton says. "I think trends are good in one sense, because at the end of the day you want to overcome the trend. At the end of the trend, some will survive no matter what's going on."
She seems determined to be one of those survivors. She is loving life on the road, even though it's so hectic it takes her a few minutes to realize that she's calling from Missouri.
"Oh my God, where am I?" she says, sounding sleepy. "I'm at a college, I know that."
Still, she's exactly where she wants to be - careerwise, if not geographically.
"I've been waiting for this tour for years," she says. "It's not like I'm opening for somebody to prove myself. I'm there to get on stage and everybody is there to see what I have to offer, and they want me to move them."
Usually, her audiences - generally young, mostly female - are touched by her dorm-room-confidential lyrics.
"Some people come up to me and say I've changed their lives and healed them in some way," she says. "Those are really huge highlights when it comes to conversing with fans.
"I'm really very similar to most of my fans. I'm kind of going through the same things that they are."
