here is the only blender article, they need to update haha
“I Was Getting Dirty!”
With Vanessa Carlton’s boyfriend, Stephan Jenkins, at the helm, making her second album is like “total playtime”
By Dorian Lynskey
Blender, October 2003
“I feel like any producer is trying to get in your pants one way or another,” Vanessa Carlton jokes. “The good thing about this is at least it’s out in the open.”
The 23-year-old singer-songwriter is explaining the advantages of having her boyfriend, Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins, produce her second album. “He really gets what I’m going for,” she says. “I’ve never felt such freedom as I have with him. Maybe that’s because I can threaten him with ‘other things’ in our relationship,” she adds, laughing.
The couple began working on the follow-up to Carlton’s 2002 multiplatinum, Grammy-nominated Be Not Nobody in June at Jenkins’s Morningwood Studios in San Francisco, and later moved on to George Lucas’s luxurious Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California.
“It’s all in and around San Francisco,” Carlton says. “I get to relieve myself of all that urban Hollywood stress. I’m just out here with the fog.”
Pondering influences on the new record, due next spring, she cites Jeff Buckley, PJ Harvey and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Sonically I’d like to use the same approach,” she says. “If you’re going to hear strings, you’re going to hear them squeak.”
Carlton compares the spirit of spontaneity and adventure in the studio to her childhood in the unorthodox Montessori school system. “I was out in the woods playing all day and getting dirty. I feel like I’m in Montessori recording sessions. This album is total playtime for me.”
