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Harmonium is the second album by American pop singer-pianist Vanessa Carlton, released by A&M Records in the United States on November 9 2004 (see 2004 in music). Carlton co-wrote some of the album with Stephan Jenkins, her boyfriend and the lead singer of Third Eye Blind, who produced the album. Harmonium debuted outside the top twenty on the U.S. Billboard 200, and sales fell considerably short of those of Carlton's debut album, Be Not Nobody (2002). Its only single in the U.S., "White Houses", was not a top forty hit; two other singles, "Private Radio" and "Who's to Say", were released only in Asia. The commercial failure of the album, which Carlton attributed to poor promotion, led to her departure from A&M Records in mid-2005. She toured through the U.S. during 2004 and 2005.

Content
Carlton said the album includes "darker themes" than those present on Be Not Nobody. She said she was past the "diary stage" of songwriting, in which "you're kind of mostly narcissistic and dealing with yourself", and that as one grows up they "start to absorb [the] environment in a different way"; she called the album a reflection of a "different" and "more womanly" perspective of the world, as opposed to the "innocent and girlish" quality of Be Not Nobody. However, she has said that although "things get a bit heavier as you get older", she still has a "lightness of youth" and is "able to be as girlie in ways that I should be." She referred to the album as "bittersweet" rather than "just bitter" and stressed the importance of the lyrics on Harmonium compared to those on Be Not Nobody, which she said was "definitely more about the music": "I want the lyric to resonate as much as the chord underneath it", she said. She said that instead of an album with "one-two punch songs", she wanted to make "a record that brings people in and want to listen to it again and every time you hear it you learn something new ... those are the kind of albums I love and that I'll listen to for years and I'll want to listen to every single song on it."

An October 2003 article in Rolling Stone magazine reported that "Private Radio" would likely be the album's lead single, and "San Francisco" the only love song. Carlton was quoted as saying "There's nothing piano recital-y about it. It's goth ... The Wicca in me has come out ... I've been able to kind of just merge the Wicca and the Eighties chick." This provoked a skeptical response from MetaFilter users, one of whom wrote "this girl needs to buy a clue." Carlton later wrote on her official internet messageboard that the article "didn't quite capture what I was trying to say ... my advice, ignore the press til you have the record."


 * "White Houses" describes a young woman losing her virginity; "I wanted to write a song that everyone could relate to, about situations that everyone faces".
 * "Annie" is a song Carlton wrote after she met a girl suffering from leukemia while on tour.
 * According to Carlton, "Private Radio" is "a jammin booty rockin' song" about insomnia. She had suffered from the condition for several years, but in October 2004 she said she "sleep[s] like a baby."
 * She said "She Floats" contains "creepy sounding strings" and is about "the kind of the euphoria that someone gets when they're tortured by being dead".
 * She has named "Who's to Say" as "one of the songs on the album I'm most proud of". She dedicated it to "anyone in a relationship that's unapproved of by their mother or government". She said she liked performing the song and that audiences at her shows connected with it.
 * She has named "Afterglow" as a favorite of hers on the album; it is about "letting go anchors of pain".


 * "Papa", a solo vocal-and-piano piece, is not about her own father but a "different kind of daddy".
 * The Fender Rhodes-driven "C'est la Vie" is an "angry" song and the only one on the album not to include the piano, and Carlton has said it is about the single time she was "dumped" and her inability to speak French; she said that to her the phrase "c'est la vie" meant "fuck it", and that it helped her overcome emotional pain during the breakup.
 * She wrote "San Francisco" in the city.
 * "Half a Week Before the Winter" is a Goth-influenced "dark song" that Carlton intended as a metaphor for Charles Darwin's theory and the concept of "survival of the fittest": "Those beautiful animals [ unicorns] again could be a symbol for so many things, they die and they shouldn't and I think it's also part my take on the music industry and how so many beautiful things that you do get eaten by the Vampires".
 * "The Wreckage", the album's closing hidden track, is about Carlton's boredom while driving and her desire to start car accidents.

She said "Morning Sting", a song that was dropped from the album, is about "emotions being so raw in the morning". She excluded from the album because although she felt it wasn't "crappy", she wanted Harmonium to contain a certain amount of songs. The album shares its name with a keyboard instrument, the harmonium, but Carlton said she "kind of adopted that word to fit my own definition"; she intended it as a portmanteau of the words "harmony" and "pandemonium" to define the approach to the recording of the album, which she described as "kind of an organized, chaotic approach where I wanted to maintain and preserve that wild abandon to creating."

Carlton considered working with Be Not Nobody producer and A&M Records president Ron Fair on the album but decided not to do so, although Fair is credited as the album's co-executive producer. She said that much of Fair's "own aesthetic and his own tastes" were present in the arrangements of the songs on Be Not Nobody, in contrast to Harmonium, where "the dominant taste and aesthetic is my own". She cited the influence of live performances on Harmonium, as opposed to the "studio gloss" present on Be Not Nobody, in creating a feeling that is "a little bit rougher around the edges and a bit more comfortable in a raw form"; according to her, "it's a record that allows everything on it to breathe. There's a lot of space on all of the tracks. You don't feel like there's a million things going on. It's really easy on the ears. It's very organic. There's nothing going on that shouldn't be going on. It's very simple in that sense." Ron Fair himself compared the two albums: "The first album was more formal. It was Vanessa Carlton in an elegant party dress. This is her in Birkenstocks and jeans". According to Carlton, because she had more knowledge of the process of recording an album and elements such as arrangements, she had more creative control over Harmonium than Be Not Nobody. She called the album "so much more sonically personal to me" and "my taste exactly. It's exactly how I would arrange everything, as opposed to someone coming in and just dressing up the songs that I wrote."

Recording
Carlton and Jenkins met and began a relationship in mid-2002, when she and rock band Third Eye Blind, of which Jenkins is lead singer, were on tour together. After seeing Carlton perform live, Jenkins entered her dressing room and expressed interest in producing her music, and according to Carlton they "decided very quickly, that we had the same vision for the album". By January 2003, Carlton had written ten songs that she intended to include on the album. "You record more, you write more. I never put a stop to my writing process", she said. Recording of the album was originally scheduled to begin with producer Daniel Lanois after the conclusion of Carlton's 2003 European concert tour, which ended in February, and she wanted Jason Falkner and Nigel Godrich to co-produce the album; she said she believed collaborators would enable her to introduce into her music "tastes and sensibilities" to which she wouldn't normally be open. She originally envisioned the album as a "solo girl" version of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "It's going to involve choruses and flutes and trumpets, and it's just real", she said. She also mentioned her desire "to establish my place with an album that's undeniably me".

Carlton began recording the album in June 2003 at Morningwood Studios (owned by Jenkins) in San Francisco, before moving to filmmaker George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. During recording, Carlton cited Jeff Buckley, PJ Harvey as additional influences on the album: "Sonically I'd like to use the same approach ... If you're going to hear strings, you're going to hear them squeak", she explained. She experimented with sounds reminiscent of the music of The Cure. Before recording began, Carlton and Jenkins conducted a series of "A-B-ing" tests to compare analog tape with Pro Tools (digital). Because they could not tell the difference, they used a mixing board that Carlton said was "similar to what a lot of the old [Led] Zeppelin tracks were mixed on, so basically we were able to get a very warm, easy-to-listen-to mix where it didn't come across as 'icy' sounding". Several instruments were tracked using analog tape, but Pro Tools was used for most of them. According to Carlton, Jenkins was "generous" with his knowledge as a producer and taught Carlton about the recording studio, helping her to "realize the way the song is enveloped is sometimes more important than the song in some ways." Carlton wrote each song with arrangements in mind and played it on the piano for Jenkins, who joined in on drums, and they began devising the arrangements. Carlton wrote some of the songs with arrangements in mind. Recording was completed at The Record Plant in Los Angeles because, as Carlton put it, "When you're in the middle of a bunch of cows, the pace of things tends to slow down." The album, which took a year to record, was mixed at Olympic Studio in London, at Waystation Studio in Beverly Hills, California, and at South Beach Studios in Miami Beach, Florida by mixers including Mark "Spike" Stent and Tom Lord Alge. According to Carlton, her label "wasn't very happy" about the decisions she made during the making of the album.

Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine suggested that Carlton co-write with Jenkins after Carlton played the album's first five songs for him. Carlton said she felt trepidation about collaborating with Jenkins and that there were "moments when things got intense" between them, but because they had similar intentions for the album and Jenkins "deferred" to and was "sensitive" to her style of piano-playing and the direction in which she wanted to take the album, she "trusted him completely" and called it "a cool collaboration". Carlton credited Jenkins with helping her to withstand and protect herself from pressures the record label, who wanted to influence the recording process, placed on her. Jenkins also played instruments and performed programming and mixing work on the album, and he recorded backing vocals with Carlton on several songs, including "She Floats", in which their vocals were edited to make it sound as if a forty-member choir was singing.

"White Houses" was the first song Carlton and Jenkins wrote together, and Lindsey Buckingham of the band Fleetwood Mac played acoustic guitar on the track after Jenkins met Buckingham, who was recording in the same building (The Record Plant, Los Angeles), and invited him to listen to the song. Carlton said, "he just came in, played this great riff, recorded it and then he left. It all happened very fast, and turned out amazing". Several other guest musicians worked on the album. Pharrell Williams of the production duo The Neptunes, who were working with Good Charlotte, contributed backing vocals to "Who's to Say". Two of the three drummers on the album were Abe Laboriel Jr., who played on Be Not Nobody, and Bryan "Brain" Mantia ("She Floats"), formerly of the band Primus. Third Eye Blind guitarists Tony Fredianelli ("San Francisco") and Arion Salazar also appear, as does former Red Hot Chili Peppers member Jesse Tobias. Carlton said she wanted to record a duet with Fleetwood Mac lead singer Stevie Nicks but never got the chance. She said "there was nothing calculated about the collaborations [on the album], nothing corporate".

A documentary, Pleased to Meet You, highlighted the process of recording the album and is included on an enhanced CD. Carlton said she thought it would "shed a lot of light the direction that I am going in and where I come from", mentioning that its working title was Pleased to Meet You: Vanessa Carlton, the New American Goth.

Critical reception
Billboard said "The album is full of beautiful, classical-leaning piano riffs and features more heartfelt lyrics than [Be Not Nobody]".

Chart performance and promotion
According to Ron Fair, a key element in the promotion of the album was radio airplay for "White Houses", which was released to radio in late August 2004. Its airplay slowly increased afterwards, and it did not enter the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 until October, peaking at eighty-six in early November. MTV censored, and later banned, the single's music video because of a lyric in the song that referred to sexual intercourse. "I think it's hypocritical", Carlton said of the situation. "All that is on MTV is sex. They are selling it all the time with sexy hip-hop videos with girls in their bras and panties doing their booty dance. But an eloquent statement about it from a female point of view...". Fair noted that the approach taken to marketing Carlton was different from those for other pop singers: "Lindsey [sic] Lohan and Hilary Duff and Ashlee Simpson are prominent media and television stars, and their music is an extension of their overall image. Vanessa is a singer/songwriter in the classic sense", and cited the significance of the success of "A Thousand Miles" (2002), Carlton's debut single, in determining how to promote the album. Chris Richards, a Borders Group music buyer, said, "When you look at an artist like that, who had an initial huge hit, the follow-up is a challenge. The new album retains the same qualities of the first. She is one of the pure-hearted girls, very squeaky clean and parent-approved". MTV News wrote, "No longer grouped with Avril Lavigne and Michelle Branch as part of a crop of young female singer/songwriters who play their own instruments, Carlton's new challenge is trying to balance her artistic credibility with a fanbase built upon TRL appeal." Carlton described herself as alternative to the "very popular" hip hop music and "really mainstream pop artists", such as Jessica Simpson and her sister, Ashlee.

Harmonium debuted at number thirty-three on the U.S. Billboard 200 with 36,000 copies sold in its first week, before falling out of the top forty in its second. By the end of 2004 it had sold less than 108,000 copies in the U.S., and it remained on the chart for just seven non-consecutive weeks. According to Nielsen SoundScan in February 2006, the album had sold 179,000 copies, an amount that compared unfavorably with the platinum sales of Carlton's debut album Be Not Nobody, which reached the top five in the U.S. Explaining Carlton's "predictable plunge" with Harmonium, the New York Daily News indicated the release date was partially responsible for the album's underperformance, while emphasising the low radio play for "White Houses": "Every holiday season, some acts wind up with nothing but a lump of coal ... more importantly, radio found no hits on Carlton's sophomore CD". Slant magazine, also attributing the album's low sales to the failure of "White Houses", alleged a lack of promotion by A&M Records: "Whether ["White Houses"] wasn't promoted adequately or audiences just didn't connect with the more mature, narrative style of the song, the label decided to let the album languish on store shelves with little support".

In early October Carlton opened for alternative rock band The Calling on their short tour of Brazil, and a performance she recorded for Sessions@AOL was aired over the internet. Later that month Carlton travelled to Japan to promote the album there, where "White Houses" failed to chart. Harmonium was released on October 21 and peaked at number fifty-two on the Oricon album chart, where Be Not Nobody had reached the top twenty; it stayed on the chart for six weeks and sold under 19,100 copies. Harmonium received more publicity in Taiwan, where MTV and Channel V aired Pleased to Meet You frequently, and MTV named Carlton its "Artist of the Month" for November. "Private Radio" reached the top ten in that month, surpassing the success of "White Houses", and Harmonium debuted at number ten on the albums chart the same week. "Who's to Say" began receiving radio airplay in Southeast Asia in mid-October and, in 2005, was released as the second single in Indonesia, where it failed to reach the top forty ("White Houses" had peaked just outside the top twenty).

To support the album Carlton embarked on a North American concert tour, which began on October 21 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and concluded on November 21 in Portland, Oregon; her opening act was pop rock band Low Millions. She said the tour would be "just me and the piano" and "totally stripped down, like an in-your-living room-type of feeling, that type of intimacy." A second tour, with Cary Brothers and Ari Hest as support acts for many of the shows, ran from March 9 (in Atlanta, Georgia) to April 30 (in Plattsburgh, New York). She recorded a cover of the Kai Winding song "Time Is on My Side" (1963) for a Time Warner digital video recorders commercial, which also served as promotion for Harmonium and received heavy rotation on U.S. television during early 2005. The newspaper Metroland wrote, "we tend to think time is most definitely not on her side &mdash; how else to explain the near-universal apathy to the release of her second album, Harmonium?" Harmonium was not re-issued to include the song. Carlton was quoted in a March 2005 interview with Fly Magazine as saying it was "difficult" for someone like her, a singer-songwriter who played the piano, to "reach a lot of people", but that "depending on what happens with the second single, I think it will do really well. I hope the record goes gold and all those things."

In April and May 2005 songs from Harmonium were featured on the WB teen soap operas Charmed and One Tree Hill. During this period Carlton participated in an exclusive performance with Ryan Cabrera, and in May she posted to her fans on her official website. She said that because "shortsighted (nonmusical bastards)" at her label "do not see how great the album would do if it was promoted", there would be no second single released in the U.S. "[I] worked my ass off promoting [H]armonium in the ways that [I] could control, but you can't sell records to someone in the middle of [I]ndiana without a little help", she wrote. By the following month, Carlton had separated from A&M Records. Some weeks before the announcement, PopMatters magazine wrote, "One has to wonder how long it will be before we hear the inevitable "the industry ate me up" stories from Vanessa Carlton. Perhaps when this record fails to outsell her debut and A&M drops her?"

During summer 2005, Carlton supported rock singer Stevie Nicks on her Gold Dust U.S. tour. Nicks said, "I just think she's a special one and I'm glad to be able to put her in front of a lot of people ... My audiences are so excellent and so caring and loving, and I want her (Carlton) to feel that ... The music business is in such bad shape. Those artists don't get nurtured ... I really respect her (Carlton). I'll be damned if I'll let her go by the wayside. She is one of the great ones. She won't quit." In October Carlton embarked on solo dates in the U.S., including one at Dartmouth College, where The Dartmouth wrote that Carlton "sought sympathy not only as the girl suffering in her song but also as the artist disappointed with her apparent lack of popularity." Carlton rejoined Nicks on her ten-date tour of Australia and New Zealand in February and March 2006.

Carlton said she was "kind of suffering" from the lack of promotion the label gave to the album because of her non-conformist attitude, but she felt she "definitely made the right decision in terms of kind of gaining the kind of attention from press and the credibility that you want to maintain throughout your career so that you can have fans that will follow you for years and years. That's really important to me."

Track listing

 * Standard edition
 * 1) "White Houses" (Carlton, Jenkins) – 3:45
 * 2) "Who's to Say" (Carlton, Jenkins) – 4:51
 * 3) "Annie" (Carlton, Jenkins) – 4:48
 * 4) "San Francisco" (Carlton) – 4:12
 * 5) "Afterglow" (Carlton) – 3:56
 * 6) "Private Radio" (Carlton, Jenkins) – 2:59
 * 7) "Half a Week Before the Winter" (Carlton) – 3:27
 * 8) "C'est la Vie" (Carlton) – 2:34
 * 9) "Papa" (Carlton) – 2:39
 * 10) "She Floats" (Carlton) – 5:15
 * 11) "The Wreckage" (Carlton) – 2:17 (hidden track)


 * Bonus track (Japan)
 * 11. "Where the Streets Have No Name" (Bono, U2) – 5:37


 * DVD (Japan)
 * 1) Pleased to Meet You – 24:42
 * 2) "White Houses" dance rehearsal – 3:34
 * 3) Duet – 1:24
 * 4) Extended footage – 8:19

Credits and personnel

 * Vanessa Carlton – backing/background vocals (tracks 1–4, 8); piano (tracks 1–7, 9–11); keyboards (tracks 3 and 7); Fender Rhodes (track 8); choir (track 10)
 * Stephan Jenkins – backing/background vocals (tracks 1–4, 8); percussion (tracks 1–2, 5); organ, electric guitar (track 4); programming, keyboards (track 6); drums (tracks 7–8, 10); mixing (tracks 9–10); choir (track 10)
 * Mark "Spike" Stent (Olympic Studio, London) – mixing (tracks 1–2, 6)
 * Arion Salazar – bass (tracks 1–6, 8, 10); electric guitar (tracks 1–2, 6)
 * Lindsey Buckingham – acoustic guitar (track 1)
 * Jesse Tobias – electric guitar (tracks 1, 4–6); additional electric guitar (track 2); guitars (track 3); mandolin (track 5); guitar (track 10)
 * Abe Laboriel Jr. – drums (tracks 1–6)
 * Ron Fair – strings arranger and conductor (tracks 1–2, 4–6, 10)
 * Pharrell Williams – background vocals (track 2)
 * Louis Conte – percussion (track 2)
 * Dave Way (Waystation Studio, Beverly Hills, California) – mixing (track 4)
 * Lior Goldenberg – mixing assistant (track 4)
 * Tony Fredianelli – electric guitar (track 4)
 * Tom Lord Alge (South Beach Studios, Miami Beach, Florida) – mixing (tracks 5 and 7)
 * Fernio Hernandez – mixing assistant (tracks 5 and 7)
 * Sean Beresford – programming (track 6); mixing (track 11)
 * Jerry Hey – trumpet (track 7)
 * Gayle Levant – harp (track 7)
 * Jason Carmer – mixing (track 8)
 * Jun Ishizeki – mixing (tracks 9–10)
 * Brain – drums (track 10)
 * Endre Granat, Bruce Dukov, Natalie Leggett, Charlie Bisharat, Jackie Brand, Julie Gigante, Robin Olson, Mario DeLeon, Alan Grunfeld, Josefina Vergara, Roberto Cani, Phillip Levy, Songa Lee, Sara Parkins, Lily Ho Chen, Sid Page, Tammy Hatwan, Armen Garabedian, Sarah Thornblade, Berj Garabedian, Anatoly Rosinsky, Eun-Mee Ahn, Tiffany Hue, Joel Derouin, Franklyn D'Antonio – violin
 * Brian Dembow, Simon Oswell, Vicki Miskolczy, Marlow Fisher, Sam Formicola, Danny Seidenberg, Matt Funes, Roland Kato, Kazi Pitelka – viola
 * Steve Erdody, David Low, Cecilia Tsan, Larry Corbett, Suzie Katayama, Armen Ksajikian – cello
 * Nico Abondolo, Mike Valerio, Oscar Hidalgo – additional bass
 * Gerry Rotella – flute
 * Tom Boyd – oboe
 * Emily Bernstein – clarinet


 * Producer: Stephan Jenkins
 * Executive producers: Vanessa Carlton, Ron Fair
 * Engineer: Sean Beresford
 * Additional engineering: Jun Ishizeki, Lior Goldenberg, Tony Espinoza
 * Strings recording: Frank Wolf, Tal Herzberg
 * A&R: Ron Fair
 * Assistant engineers: Judy Kirschner, Dann Thompson (Skywalker Sound); Jun Ishizeki (The Record Plant); Scott Brannan (Mourningwood Studio)
 * Art direction: Vanessa Carlton, Drew FitzGerald
 * Illustrations: Drew FitzGerald
 * Font designer: Vanessa Carlton
 * Hair: Sarra 'Na
 * Makeup: Heather Currie
 * Styling: Arianna Tunney and Alyssa Leal
 * Photography: Sheryl Nields
 * Management: Arthur Spivak, Stuart Sobol and Deborah Klein
 * Legal representation: Tim Mandelbaum