Home >  A & E

Friday, August 16, 2002

By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor

The offer was on the table for Vanessa Carlton to be fashioned as another Britney.

	Vanessa Carlton: "When I was looking for a deal, people were like, 'You can dance and you're cute -- let's get rid of the piano.' " Artist's Site www.vanessacarlton.com Vanessa Carlton WITH: The Goo Goo Dolls and Third Eye Blind. WHERE: Post-Gazette Pavilion. WHEN: Sunday at 7 p.m. TICKETS: $18-$35; 412-323-1919.

But she hadn't spent all that time training as a pianist and ballerina and writing her own songs to dance around in a belly shirt.

"I refused to sign with a label that had those kind of plans mapped out for me," Carlton says in phone interview. "When I was looking for a deal, people were like, 'You can dance and you're cute -- let's get rid of the piano. And don't you want to sing songs that we write for you, then you won't have to write your songs anymore?' I was, like, 'Writing my songs is not a burden,' this is what I'm going to do. So I had the confidence to walk out of those meetings."

Good thing, too, because the 21-year-old Carlton has been embraced by a young pop audience that's showing signs of wanting something more than another pre-fab teen-pop icon. With MTV's support for the single "A Thousand Miles," Carlton's debut album, "Be Not Nobody," debuted at No. 5, and Rolling Stone put her on the list of 10 artists to watch in 2002.

It's a surprising turn for a young artist who was expected to be devoting her life to Balanchine, not ballads. Carlton, from the small eastern Pennsylvania town of Milford, left home at 14 to live at Lincoln Center and attend the prestigious School of American Ballet in New York. She was considered "the ballerina who could play piano."

When she became disenchanted with the rigid structure of dance after a few years, she found refuge at a piano in her dorm.

"I started becoming frustrated at the school," she says, "I was butting heads with my teachers, dreading going to class and hating the way it was structured. I started skipping my classes to write songs. That's when it started. There were no rules. I could do and say and sing however I wanted to. The freedom was overwhelming, and I needed it."

Her father, who had turned her on to classic rock such as Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones at a young age, helped get her around to open-stage nights and saw her through the recording of a demo. Then, even after Interscope chief Jimmy Iovine caught her at a showcase and signed her to Universal, there was a long lag time before "Be Not Nobody" saw the light of day.

"I just sat on my label for a good two years because no one understood how I could benefit that label in any way," she says. "The thought was, 'This girl is comparatively, in terms of Britney, an alternative, avant-garde piano chick.' It was difficult for me, because I knew in my heart that people would connect with this music, but I had to wait for them to figure it out. To see an artist like Alicia Keys do well definitely helped."

Carlton's piano-driven songs about anguished love, naturally, draw comparisons to Keys, as well as Fiona Apple and Tori Amos. She looked up to them as self-contained female artists.

"I have all their records. I think they're incredible musicians," she says. "Musically, I'm not influenced by them, but people will say whatever they will. 'Yeah, she's a chick that plays piano, too, so they're all the same.' If you listen to the song, you'll come away with something different."

Carlton is touring with the Goo Goo Dolls now and plans to headline her own tour in the fall. But she also plans to go back to school at some point. The idea of being a pop star hasn't really hit home yet.

"I don't know what that's supposed to feel like," she says. "I feel like I'm the same girl. I have the same friends, same family, same apartment, I sleep in the same bed. I don't get it. Honestly, it still hasn't hit me."