http://www.beatweek.com/music/musicianinterviews/8854-vanessa-carlton-interview-rabbits-on-the-run-carousel-and-waking-up/Vanessa Carlton interview: Rabbits on the Run, Carousel, and waking up“A Thousand Miles” is nothing compared to the distance Vanessa Carlton had to travel in order to breathe life into Rabbits on the Run, her first record since 2007. The journey encompassed a trip to England, a venture into life as an indie artist, and a voyage of awakening through her own mind.
Four years is not that long between albums. But you did go and disappear for awhile before this record.Yeah I practically fell off the face of the earth, and was happy to. I was in my own world. I was really going through a lot of transitioning of my life, personally, professionally. I’ll stay vague about it, but I really had to in my own way lose a lot. I don’t want to use the cliche “rock bottom” because it wasn’t rock bottom, but I was very confused at a lot of decisions I had made, I think. In a way, what’s worse than getting your heart broken is breaking your own heart. I really feel like I had to recover from that, and I feel like I had to make some big changes.
Were you working on Rabbits On The Run at the time, or did you have to isolate yourself from music as well?I think music isolated itself from me (laughs). It was like “Nope, you are not ready to touch me again.” Actually that’s not true. I was writing a lot of instrumental pieces. But I did not see a record at all. I didn’t know if I was ever going to do another record. The blueprint of another record wasn’t clear to me. I had nothing to say. And then slowly things got better. I started to figure it out and piece it together. Once I wrote London, which was the first song, the record unfolded itself to me and I was like “This is the record.” If I’m gonna do this, I want this to be the record I’ve always wanted to make, and I think the only way to do that was really cut ties with a label and do it myself. And that’s what I did. It set me off on some path that I had never been on before, and I just feel so awake now.
You made this record in the English countryside, which is quite a contrast with the fact that you’re a New Yorker.Things about this record unfolded in an organic, almost mystical way. The way things tied together, I still can’t believe it. Box, England is absolutely the place that I was meant to make this record. Did I know that? No. Was it pre-planned? No. Things just unfolded in the most natural, wonderful way. I’ve never had that happen in a project I’ve worked on before, and I think you can feel it in the work, maybe. It was just pure arts and crafts for everybody involved.
I ran into Steve Osborne, who I’d been searching for, at a bonfire party at my friend’s house in Hungerford, England. He was like “Oh, I’m actually working at Real World studios, come by and visit, let’s hang out, let’s meet.” I go there and I’m like, this is where the hobbits are. I’ve been searching for this place all my life. I can’t even believe this is happening. I’d been looking for a children’s choir. Coincidentally, the cousins I was staying with in London, their daughter was part of a choir that I ended up working with for the record. Once you’re just awake and open to it, the blueprint just kind of writes itself.
Carousel includes the line “rabbits on the run” in reference to the book Watership Down. Did you already have that phrase in mind when you wrote the lyrics to the rest of the song?That’s a good question because that’s the thing, I dreamt it. I don’t know if you’ve ever had songs that you write in your dreams, and they sound amazing in your dream because dreams are just motion. Then you wake up and they’re usually kind of shit. They’re embarrassingly bad. Carousel, I woke up at 3:30 with it in my head, had ascending lines, the kind of hopeful glory of that song, and simplicity of it. I went to the piano, recorded it, and then I went back to my bed by 3:45 and wrote with my thumbs on my BlackBerry all these ideas. I did spend a lot of time fleshing through it the next day, but the majority of that song was written then.
It’s one of those really organic threads that have happened with this project where it was like yeah, reading Watership Down and then I don’t know, it just came out. “Rabbits on the run” is pretty obvious, if you’ve read the book. I would say it is a direct reference to the story of Watership Down, and it is also very purposefully rabbits, like as a collective, all of us as a collection of human beings. It’s not my solitary story. It’s about the collective of us. So that was important to me.
The whole time the lyrics are “All you’ll hear is the music, beauty stands before you,” like you’re telling this message to some friend of yours. And then at the end you turn it back around on yourself, first person. “All I hear is the music, beauty stands before me.” I’ve been wondering if this was a song that you had written as a message to yourself.I had to feel that message for myself in an authentic way in order for me to write that song, and that was one of the first times that I’ve felt that thought in years. So I would say that song is doing double duty. Every time I sing it, it makes me happy.
With the song I Don’t Want To Be A Bride, there’s a curiosity as to whether that was just a sentiment you felt in the moment you were writing it, or do you really feel like you never want to get married and that’s not going to change?It’s something even bigger than that, and I think it’s about not canceling out love with liberation. It’s not about open relationships, which I support that as well. It’s more about I have yet to hear that message being sung to me by anyone. Maybe I’m the minority, but I feel like I’m in the most curious kind of libertine chapter, one of the most wonderful chapters of my life. Usually this is when the pressure comes in from society as a woman to lock it down, and I just don’t think it’s fair. I also, with that said, believe wholly in a great love. I really do. I feel like both should be able to exist. So right now that defines how I feel, and I think hopefully there’s others out there that know what I’m talking about.
The end of this record devolves into this ethereal kind of thing. What was going on in there with those soundscapes?It was a prayer to my brother. I wrote it for my brother. He lost someone very close to him. A sliver of it is a little bit to myself and the collective. We wanted it very much to devolve into something cosmically celestial. It’s the end of the record but it’s never the end.
