Vanessa Carlton unveils her latest music video for the song "Back To Life" directed by Patrick McPheron. The track is off her latest album Love Is An Art produced by Dave Fridmann (MGMT, Flaming Lips).
In the transitory chapter between the end of active addiction or abuse and the beginnings of recovery, you have no choice but to deeply feel everything you've tried to numb. The song's layers of piano, synths, background harmonies, and drum machines meld into the feeling of ice water. The song brings to mind the stillness of a frozen lake with undulating currents moving underneath. The music itself is the feeling of a body coming back to life from the inside out. - Vanessa Carlton
Love Is An Art 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.
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.
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.
Last month, Vanessa released her third songbook via Hal Leonard titled The Best of Vanessa Carlton. The songbook features sixteen of Vanessa's favorite songs, in arrangements for piano, voice and guitar, from all of her albums thus far, including Be Not Nobody, Harmonium, Heroes and Thieves, Rabbits on the Run, Liberman and Love Is An Art. The Best of Vanessa Carlton Songbook is available at Hal Leonard.
