Vanessa Carlton is thrilled to release her highly anticipated sixth studio album, Love Is An Art via Dine Alone Records. The album produced by Dave Fridmann (MGMT, Flaming Lips), explores the eternal seesaw that is human connection: the push, the pull, the balance, the bottoming out. It’s that constantly evolving nature of love, expectations and compassion that Carlton analyzes from all angles on Love Is An Art, from romantic, to parental, to the friends that hold us up and the leaders that repeatedly let us down.
“This art project is being released during unprecedented times” says Carlton. “There could not be a better time to send this out to the world. Music connects us and frees us all at once. It will be art that gives us the strength to survive these times. I spent two years working on this music with visionary artists and I hope that people feel healed by our muses. Despite this invisible war we are fighting, we must find the quiet moments to simply listen and connect and feel human.”
Love Is An Art finds Carlton reckoning with toxic relationships (the confessional “Miner’s Canary”), eternal partnership (“Companion Star”) and the children who fill the world with love and grace while politicians fill their pockets (the passionate “Die, Dinosaur,” written after the shootings in Parkland, Florida). And true to Carlton’s skill as both a lyricist and an instrumentalist, the arrangements on Love Is An Art tell these tales as vibrantly as the words themselves: piano parts that speak of rage and tenderness, synths that burst and glow like dawn.
The album doesn’t just explore connections – it was also born of one. Carlton wrote the album with the acclaimed Nashville-based singer-songwriter Tristen, camped out and working while her daughter napped. “This record is about being out of my comfort zone,” says Carlton. “What’s going to happen when we do things that people assume are not naturally a match, like working with Dave Fridmann? I loved the idea of working with someone who’s known for a palette that isn’t associated with me, but it was a fit the second we started working together. Or what could happen when I sit with another writer, and just collaborate?”
Carlton has constantly challenged both herself and the expectations that surround her throughout her lengthy, accomplished career: she attended both the School of American Ballet and Columbia University, and was discovered as a singer-songwriter/pianist when a cassette tape demo was given to legendary music impresario Ahmet Ertegun. With her debut single “A Thousand Miles,” Carlton soared to the top of the Billboard charts and garnered multiple Grammy nominations, though that song is only a small fraction of the body of work and artistic identity she’s developed since then, ever evolving and growing as a performer and songwriter. In the summer of 2019, she pushed that even further, making her Broadway debut as Carole King in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
Check out more information on Vanessa Carlton here.
