Vanessa Carlton: How she found the black and white keys to her bright, bright future

Interview, April, 2002 by Ray Rogers

"Silent All These Years" would be a great title for the piano-pounding wunderkind Vanessa Carlton's life up to this point. And not just because it's the name of her musical forebear Tori Amos' first hit. After studying at Manhattan's prestigious School of American Ballet throughout her teens, Carlton turned to the piano for self-expression. "When you're dancing you're sort of silent," the 21-year-old Pennsylvania native recalls. "But when I was upstairs in the dorm's kitchen, playing on a shifty old piano and singing at the top of my lungs, it was like I could finally speak."

Her dance training wasn't all for naught: On her forthcoming debut, Be Not Nobody (A&M), Carlton displays a ballerina's disciplined spirit on the piano, playing with a potent combination of effortless beauty and physical force. Raised on a steady diet of classical music (Debussy is a favorite) and classic rock like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, it's no wonder her debut single "A Thousand Miles" calls to mind Tori Amos. (Even Carlton's description of the album--"it's a journey of me"--feels like an Amos sound bite.)

As for that title, she's well aware it's a double negative. The phrase came to her in a dream and, bad grammar be damned, she's sticking to her vision. "Sometimes when things are not correct," she notes, "they make so much more sense."

Ray Rogers is a longtime Interview contributor.