“I heard that Robin Williams filmed his last film here,” Vanessa Carlton says, playing tour guide outside of Sip Cafe in Inglewood on a warm autumn day in early November. “He was a bank teller. This was a bank. I just love that, just love Robin.”
Carlton, sitting across a wobbly wire table, wears ripped jeans and a light-blue chambray shirt. Her black hair, loose down her back, is the only dark thing about her. The longtime New Yorker, whose 2002 record Be Not Nobody took less than seven months to be certified Platinum, seems relaxed in her adopted neighborhood. She lives nearby, in the “dream house” that she and her husband, Deer Tick frontman John McCauley, are still unpacking. Just up the road, a sitter is watching daughter Sidney. Her long-haired dachshund, Victor, lies at her feet.
“It was a different lifetime,” she tells the Scene of the Nobody days. “And I was a baby! I needed to cut ties with all of this, and let this all go, and really just get quiet and figure out what the hell I have to contribute to music. What is the sound that moves me? What is the approach to this craft that I want?”
Nobody was Carlton’s breakout record, positioning her as an overnight star in a time when strong women were emerging across a swath of genres as bona fide celebrities. Ashanti, Avril Lavigne, Shakira — they were the decade’s divas, and Carlton was there, briefly, staking her claim to the singer-songwriter archetype, the “girl with piano.”
“I know artists change and evolve, that’s just the way it works,” she says, “but I think I really had to take myself out of that washing machine, that major-label system I was in. It blinded me to a lot of exploration.”
The singer parted ways with A&M Records in 2005, following the sophomore slump of Nobody’s 2004 follow-up, Harmonium. She’s since released three records on smaller labels. Her latest studio album, Liberman (released last year on Canadian indie Dine Alone Records), is a dreamlike listen of multilayered folk inspired by the psychedelic color palette of a painting by her long-deceased grandfather. Written in New York, the city where she’d lived since she was 13, the songs were primarily recorded in the U.K., but ultimately finished in Nashville with local studio whiz Adam Landry, who produced Deer Tick’s 2013 full-length Negativity.
Liberman is also unique for Carlton in that it features McCauley as a co-writer on two of its key tracks — the catchy single “Operator” and benediction-like album-closer “Ascension.” Carlton credits the sparse piano on the latter to McCauley, who she says played its chords at all hours of the day for six months while they lived together in her New York home.
“I would start singing over it,” she recalls. “That was one of those moments that was really beautiful.”
Carlton is quick to credit her husband — whom she married in a December 2013 ceremony officiated by Stevie Nicks — with more than just songs. She says he was largely responsible for her introduction to his East Nashville stomping ground, before the two moved in together in New York. The pair divided their time between NYC and Nashville until moving to Music City full time in January 2015. They were in Nashville, staying in an Airbnb while she was finishing Liberman, when, on a whim, they started house-hunting. They found one and bought it in a whirlwind in March 2014, spent close to a year remodeling, and then flipped it. The house sold “within hours,” the singer says, and the couple moved just down the road to a bigger, more musician-friendly space where they can put Sidney to bed on one side of the house and then noodle around on songs on the other side without fear of waking the baby.
“When I got my first record deal, I was shipped out to L.A., where you’re in a total vacuum,” Carlton says. “[McCauley] has this network of musicians [in Nashville] that he knows and loves, and they know and love him. I was so in awe of that.”
Though she’s been in Nashville only a relatively short time, Carlton says she’s already made friendships with other artists across genres that she never expected, including Amanda Shires and her husband Jason Isbell. She and McCauley frequent the newly remodeled Belcourt Theatre — “It’s such a well-curated theater,” she says — and you can find her often in nearby Shelby Bottoms Metro Park. But maybe the best example of her Music City assimilation is Liberman Live, her first live record, which she recorded at 3rd & Lindsley and released Oct. 21 via Dine Alone.
“I see the ads right now for super-conservative politicians — ‘They represent our values,’ ” she says in character. “But I find it to be very diverse in Nashville, and that’s important to me. I don’t want to live in some homogenous zone.”
That’s not to say there hasn’t been some adjustment. Recently Carlton rushed her daughter to Vanderbilt’s emergency room after a bump on the head, only to have Child Protective Services interview her when, in her panic, she forgot Sidney’s birth year. Though the social worker quickly realized it was a non-issue, “Ever since then, let me tell you, I know her birthday,” Carlton says, laughing.
