Vanessa Carlton

Early life

Vanessa Lee Carlton entered the world on August 16, 1980, in Milford, Pennsylvania, as the eldest of three kids. Her father, Edmund "Ed" Carlton, flew business jets for a living, while her mother, Heidi Lee, taught piano and music at a school and gave her daughter early lessons on the keys. Her siblings are a sister named Gwen and a brother named Edmund. On her mother's side, the family is Jewish from Queens, New York.

Her maternal grandfather originally went by the surname Liberman but changed it to Lee after World War II because of antisemitism; he worked as a painter and shopkeeper in New York. Carlton later paid tribute to him by naming an album and her own record label after him. Music grabbed her early: at age two, a trip to Disneyland inspired her to come home and play "It's a Small World" on the piano. By nine, she was hooked on dance.

At thirteen, she studied ballet in New York City under Gelsey Kirkland and Madame Nenette Charisse. In 1994, when she was fourteen, she joined the School of American Ballet. To escape the rigors of ballet training, she turned to songwriting, often composing at a piano in her dormitory kitchen. In ninth grade, she became close friends with Julia Stiles, who later became an actress and director.

Around sixteen or seventeen, she began recording demos. Skipping a ballet class she disliked, she'd write music instead. At her parents' Philadelphia home in 1997 or 1998, she stumbled on the piano riff that would become part of "A Thousand Miles." Her mother predicted it would be a hit, but Carlton didn't finish it until a weekend challenge pushed her to complete it.

The song was inspired by a crush on a Juilliard student who later became a famous actor. Her father, the pilot, passed her demo tapes to his clients; one reached Ahmet Ertegun, a co-founder of Atlantic Records, who became her mentor. She finished ballet school in 1998, then waited tables in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, while playing small gigs. At eighteen or nineteen, she inked her first publishing deal.

Career

Vanessa Carlton's big break came in 2001 when she crossed paths with songwriter and producer Peter Zizzo at a New York Songwriters Circle event held at the club A Bitter End. Zizzo asked her to cut a demo at his studio, and later introduced her to record executive Jimmy Iovine. After catching one of her performances, Iovine signed her to A&M Records. A&M president Ron Fair heard Carlton's demo of "A Thousand Miles," then set up recording sessions and took on the roles of producer and arranger for the track.

Carlton initially worked on an album called Rinse, but Fair scrapped it, saying it didn't reach her potential. Instead, the label spent an extra year starting from scratch, reworking many of those early songs into her debut album, Be Not Nobody (2002). One leftover, "Carnival," was re-recorded as "Dark Carnival" for the 2003 video game SpyHunter 2. "A Thousand Miles" climbed into the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 and ended up as the year's sixth most-played song.

At the 45th Grammy Awards, it earned nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s). Be Not Nobody hit No. 5 on the Billboard 200, moving 102,000 copies in its first week and eventually selling over 1.4 million worldwide. The album also spawned the singles "Ordinary Day" and "Pretty Baby." During summer 2002, Carlton opened for the Goo Goo Dolls and Third Eye Blind, then headlined her own tour that fall, followed by a European leg in early 2003. That same year, she sang descant vocals on the Counting Crows' cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi."

2004–2005: Harmonium

In fall 2003, Carlton enrolled at Columbia University to study English but left after a couple of semesters. In August 2004, she played piano on Zucchero Fornaciari's cover of "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime," titled "Indaco dagli occhi del cielo," featuring violinist Haylie Ecker. Her single "White Houses" hit radio in late August 2004 and peaked at No. 86 on the Hot 100; MTV censored and eventually banned its video over the lyric "You were my first time," seen as a reference to losing virginity. That October, she provided backing vocals on Kimya Dawson's song "Moving On," from Dawson's album Hidden Vagenda.

Personal life

Therefore, this section is omitted.