Vanessa Carlton

“Writing this record let me recapture who I am. It is summed up in the title Be Not Nobody. You need to feel comfortable in your skin and do whatever you need to do for yourself, to heal or to grow.”

“Plus, there were so many pianos in my house, so I couldn't really avoid it.”

“My mom would give me a piece to play, but I wouldn't do any theory because when it came time to do it I would sneak back upstairs and watch TV. So, I had these kind of nonchalant lessons for years, then it just started soaking in.”

“Now, performing is second nature and I love every second of it. It is a very emotional thing when I can't play a song; maybe I'm hitting on something that I don't want to deal with. All of it is so personal. It is like therapy.”

“If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.”

“And it's sad because it's like a surprise to people - almost an anomaly - when artists are actually refined and trained on an instrument. That's the last thing people think about.”

“The music industry is so easy compared to the ballet world.”

“I am always drawn to men that are funny. I do not know why. But I am always drawn to people that are struggling with parts of themselves... But it's like in the end, there has to be confidence.”

“My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart.”

“Toting around a full orchestra on tour is very ambitious. I would consider doing a show now and then, like do a show at Radio City or Carnegie Hall with a full orchestra.”

“I am not this big celebrity, but it gets really crazy. You have to go through the nuts of blowing up, in a sense, and then figuring out how to live your life with that.”

“I have gone from being a 21-year-old with wide eyes to a 24-year-old woman. With success comes a lot of responsibility and power.”

“But when you hear the complete album, it gets dark, really straight-up rock, with some really intimate moments with just me and the piano. It's not completely me because there are parts of me that aren't on that song, that are on the album.”

“When it comes to music, we live in a very different world than everyone did in the 1960s and 1970s.”

“The heart of a woman will never be found in the arms of a man.”

“I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.”

“I did not stop dancing; I did take two years off to get myself together.”

“I learned a lot from that first record and I learned a lot from my experiences touring, but really the biggest education I got over the past two years was learning the importance of arrangements.”

“But now - look, I have to take care of myself. I work out every day. I'm a dancer. I've always been an athlete, and I'm one of those people who start to go crazy if they don't run or do something.”

“A lot of people give in to those pressures and let others influence the process on their second albums because they want to achieve the success they had with their first again, but they don't know how to do it.”