Vanessa Carlton Artistfacts

August 16, 1980
Vanessa Carlton was raised in small-town Pennsylvania. Her piano teacher mother, Heidi Lee, would play Bach and Mozart while she was pregnant with her daughter at least two hours a day.
Vanessa Carlton was 8 years old when she wrote her first song, which was a piano composition. She recalled to American Songwriter: "I wrote the sheet music out too. That was probably the last time I ever wrote out sheet music of something I wrote. It took way longer to write it out than to actually come up with the song. I think it was sort of a minor-y melody about a waterfall. There were no words."
She enrolled at New York City's prestigious School of American Ballet at the age of 14, but it wasn't an enjoyable experience. "I really had a hard time with dance after I went to the School of American Ballet," Carlton explained to The Cleveland Scene. "[It was] just a very intense, kind of fascist school, where I started to hate dancing."
Asked about her usual songwriting process, Carlton replied: "I think I'm an instrumentalist first. I usually always start with the keys. But sometimes a hook will pop in my head when I'm not at the piano and sometimes a lyrical idea will hit me, and then that will inspire the chords."
She struggled with depression as a teenager, and developed anorexia after completing high school. After seeking therapy Carlton overcame her eating disorder before her first single debuted, and she now manages her depression with medication.
Some of the songs on Vanessa Carlton's fourth album Rabbits On The Run were inspired by two books that are very important to her, Watership Down and A Brief History of Time. Speaking with us in 2011, she explained: "I connect with both emotionally - I have an emotional reaction to A Brief History of Time."

"But Watership Down was more like kind of the emotional bible, and I did carry it around like it was a bible. But before that it was Brief History of Time, because the thing with A Brief History of Time and all of the pain, I was struggling a lot personally with a lot of things crumbling and a lot of chaos, and turned to that book, and that kind of got me through it. That was in conjunction with therapy. But that book made me understand things and crystallize things in a way that I was never able to do before."
On June 19, 2010, Carlton came out as bisexual while headlining Nashville Pride. She told the audience, "I've never said this before, but I am a proud bisexual woman that will inspire the chords." In the past, Carlton has dedicated her song of forbidden love, "Who's To Say," to her gay fans.
Despite once declaring that she didn't want to be a bride, Vanessa Carlton married Deer Tick singer John McCauley on December 27, 2013. She got her friend and mentor, Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, to officiate the wedding ceremony.