Songfacts®:

• The first single from Vanessa Carlton's fourth album Rabbits on the Run, she told us "Carousel" is "the only song I've ever written in a dream that sounded great in the morning." Apparently, many of the best songs come in the form of dreams, but capturing them before they flutter off is the challenge - perhaps the best example is how Keith Richards managed to get the "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" riff on tape before he fell back to sleep.
  
  For Carlton, she was enjoying a pleasant dream where the "da na na na na" tune was floating around. To her, it sounded like a musical scale. Said Carlton: "I woke up with a feeling more than the words. But I had the scale and I had the rhythm of the chorus, which is like you're resting on the one note. It was like 3:30, I'd woken up, and I went out to the piano and just recorded it quickly on my garage band, the piano part - I have no idea how I remembered it. So I just played that and then I went back to bed. And now the words started coming, the vibe of the song lyrically, it was all coming. And I wrote it all down in the dark in my Blackberry." (Check out our full interview with Vanessa Carlton.)