From
ign.comVanessa Carlton Interview
The singer/songwriter discusses her latest album.
December 01, 2004 - In 2002 a young girl from a tiny town in Pennsylvania helped re-ignite the once dominant musical aura of the singer-songwriter. Not only that, but she, along with the likes of Alicia Keys, helped make the piano a cool and emotive instrument in the eyes of the general music buying/listening public. That girl was Vanessa Carlton. The album was called Be Not Nobody. The song, which helped catapult her to fame was the inescapably catchy "A Thousand Miles," which was propelled by one of the most engaging piano riffs to come down the pike since Billy Joel and Elton John dominated the ivories.
Flash forward to 2004 and Carlton, after a lengthy hiatus spent touring and writing, has re-emerged on the scene with her sophomore effort, Harmonium. Produced by her boyfriend, Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins, the album builds upon the foundation Carlton laid two years prior.
We caught up with Vanessa as she prepped for her end of the year tour and engaged her in a discussion about the album, from the unique title to the collaborative recording process. She even exposed the secret behind how she gets her piano to and from gigs.
IGN Music: I'm curious about the title of the album. To the best of my knowledge a harmonium is more archaic, funky version of the piano that uses bellows and works more on the principles of air flowing through it than the more percussive nature of a traditional piano.
Vanessa Carlton: Right! I'm impressed, most people don't know what it is. I kind of adopted that word to fit my own definition. Yes, it's an instrument, but I didn't play the instrument on the album. It basically sounds like "harmony" and "pandemonium" put together. It sounds to me like the lifestyle of harmony, which is really weird. But the approach to recording this album was kind of an organized, chaotic approach where I wanted to maintain and preserve that wild abandon to creating. And "Harmonium" sounded exactly like that [laughs]. If I was going to define "harmonium," which I did, then that would be the definition that would be what it means to me.IGN Music: Basically you took an old word and turned it into post-millennial Vanessa Carlton slang.
Vanessa Carlton: Exactly! [laughs] It's totally slang.IGN Music: While you say you didn't play the harmonium anywhere on the album, did anybody else? There's that song "Annie" which has a musical bit that sounds awfully similar to the sounds that emanate from a harmonium.
Vanessa Carlton: Yeah, that was a flute-like keyboard sound. That was actually a sample through a keyboard.IGN Music: So, to clarify, there is no harmonium anywhere on the album other than the title.
Vanessa Carlton: Nope! You can look and you won't find it [laughs].IGN Music: Now I have read that the tour you are embarking on will feature a full-blown orchestra…
Vanessa Carlton: No. I don't know how that rumor got spread around. It's just me and the piano. It's totally stripped down, like an in-your-living room-type of feeling, that type of intimacy. It's very small and it's just me and the piano.IGN Music: Have you ever considered going out on the road with a full orchestra?
Vanessa Carlton: I could never afford it [laughs], so not really. Toting around a full orchestra on tour is very ambitious. I would consider doing a show now and then, like do a show at Radio City or Carnegie Hall with a full orchestra. Yeah, that would be great.IGN Music: Cool. Now with it just being you and the piano up there in front of an audience, you're kind of naked you know? I mean it's not like you have a band that you can hide behind.
Vanessa Carlton: Exactly. It's a little scary, but that's really how I feel most comfortable and it's the way that I used to play all the time and ultimately I feel—though it's just me on my own—more powerful. I'm controlling everything that everyone is hearing.IGN Music: Now taking a piano on tour, that's gotta be kind of a pain, both in terms of logistics and just the sheer size and weight of it. Do you just require each venue you perform at to supply you with a certain type of piano or do you in fact take your own personal one out on the road?
Vanessa Carlton: I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.IGN Music: How did you come to enlist Stephan Jenkins in the role of producer on this album?
Vanessa Carlton: We were touring together about a year-and-a-half ago and I'd been impressed with his records over the years, but what we share is a vision for this record and we wanted to achieve the same sound and I knew that he wasn't gonna dress me up in his own tastes, really. I mean obviously if it was gonna be something like that, that he shared with me, or that he kind of impressed upon me, it would be more in line with what I wanted to do. I felt like he was going to provide me with all the tools I needed to make the type of album that I needed to make and ultimately we made an extraordinary record together. We ended up co-writing music, as well. We ended up co-writing like three or four songs. That made me a better writer and I think that it made both of us better at what we do and I think that's the sign of a really good partnership.IGN Music: Would you view this relationship, musically speaking, that is, as being more of a collaborative one?
Vanessa Carlton: Well every day you're working hours together. Music is a collaborative effort on everybody's part when you're making an album. All the musicians, the producer, the engineer, yeah, it's a team of people working and trying to achieve one vision, one sound.IGN Music: That to me seems to be the ideal result. But a lot of times I've heard where it ends up being just one person's vision and they end up dictating what they want/need to the rest of the people involved, having them along more as help as opposed to collaborators, where they are bouncing ideas back and forth amongst themselves.
Vanessa Carlton: The only time that there would be dictating was on my part now and then, but very rarely would I have to. I mean ultimately I am the artist, so if I really felt strongly about something, Stephan would defer to me because it's my album.IGN Music: One of the things that I appreciated was that you took your time between albums. It's been two years and some change since you dropped your debut Be Not Nobody. In this day and age when everybody seems to be rushing to put out as many albums as possible in the shortest span of time, it was nice to see you taking the time to actually breathe between records.
Vanessa Carlton: Yeah, I think people do that to try and capitalize on attention, but I just wasn't going to release the album until it was ready and until it was right. There actually was pressure to get it out, but I really needed to sit and think and write and take my time. It took longer than I thought it was going to. We recorded Harmonium for a year. You can only move so fast [laughs].IGN Music: What kind of thought process went into making this album, especially considering the commercial success of your first record? I mean did you consciously think about having to top what you did previously while also being aware of not repeating yourself?
Vanessa Carlton: I learned a lot from that first record and I learned a lot from my experiences touring, but really the biggest education I got over the past two years was learning the importance of arrangements. Not just the song itself, not just the sound of the piano and the vocals, but the palette of sounds that you're gonna use for a record completely changes the way the listener feels. I've always just been a singer-songwriter; 'Here's my songs. Okay.' Now we have to dress them up in something to make them sound more finished? That was something I never understood. On this album it wasn't about dressing up music that was already written. The way that Stephan and I did it was that I would bring in a song and I'd start playing it. He plays the drums, so he would play drums and we'd start hashing out the arrangements right away. I was even sensitive enough to write songs with arrangements in mind, so every sound on this album is something that if I could play that instrument, I would play it that way. It's just so much more sonically personal to me. It's my taste exactly. It's exactly how I would arrange everything, as opposed to someone coming in and just dressing up the songs that I wrote. -- Spence D.
