Working in San Francisco with producer, boyfriend and Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins, Vanessa Carlton has finished six songs for the follow up to her 2002 Grammy-nominated debut Be Not Nobody.

"I'm singing about suicide, insomnia and paranoia," Carlton says about the album, which isn't due until next year. "There's nothing piano recital-y about it. It's goth."

Asked to explain, Carlton answers with a question of her own: "Do you know what Wicca is? I believe in like spells and stuff like that. The Wicca in me has come out. It's very dark subject matter, but the approach to recording is very rhythmic and raw, it ends up being very spontaneous and more human."

Among the tracks completed are the likely first single, "Private Radio," about insomnia; "She Floats," about "the kind of the euphoria that someone gets when they're tortured by being dead"; "Morning Sting," about "emotions being so raw in the morning"; and the only love song, "San Francisco."

"I've been able to kind of just merge the Wicca and the Eighties chick," Carlton says. "I'm twenty-three now, and I think I'm more evolved, more secure in who I am. I'm beyond the diary-confessional chapter of my writing. It can get a bit heavy, but it's kind of tongue and cheek at times, and it's not so end-of-the-world."

The recording process is also being filmed for a documentary that will be released with the album next fall. "I think it will shed a lot of light the direction that I am going in and where I come from," Carlton says. "[The director] wants to name it Pleased To Meet You: Vanessa Carlton, the New American Goth."

KERRY L. SMITH
(October 7, 2003)