Let's get "A Thousand Miles" out of the way. Fourteen years ago, Vanessa Carlton made a very popular song that will follow her around forever. Fair enough; it's very catchy. But times have changed. Can't Vanessa? She recently told CBS News that she "learned a lot" since her debut album, "which is mostly that you don't know anything." That's as good a place as any to reset, which she does with the refreshingly raw Liberman.
Like the bulk of her recordings, it's still comprised of her honeysuckle voice and piano licks, but Liberman (so named after Carlton's grandfather, one of whose paintings of nudes hangs in her home and served, she says, as a sort of inspiration) either lets those components stand alone or accentuates them with mild indulgences, like blunted brass or hand claps. The bare songwriting is not something you would identify as avant-garde, but Carlton's inclinations are a lot weirder than they used to be. Take the album cover, which with its thick white border and bold black type resembles a Gentlewoman magazine cover. This isn't quite an album of Swiss design-inspired art jams, but maybe it's her version. The single "Operator" has Carlton using the huskiness of her voice to sound threatening in a way that makes you wonder what a truly severe Vanessa Carlton album might sound like.
Still, Liberman is excellent on its own. Carlton's voice is the key attraction on songs that register between low-key pop, rock, and folk. Early single "Blue Pool", for example, touches on each in a way that feels refreshingly old school, as though pop radio these days was comprised of Fleetwood Mac and the Mamas and the Papas. The song's latter third is given over entirely to arpeggiating keyboard runs in a way you don't notice at first, because it's so atmospheric and catchy. But it's also odd—is this a sketch of a song? An extended outro? What is it doing here?
The album is pockmarked with quirky decisions like this and it's better for it. Were Liberman the creation of a heretofore-unknown artist, it's difficult to imagine an album of such earnestness generating the kind of pre-release interest that would deem it worthy of CBS News. But that's the pickle of early success. The flipside is that it's also harder to imagine fans of punkier singer-songwriters like Angel Olsen or Tobias Jesso Jr. embracing her. She should share a stage with Perfume Genius. They both have beautiful voices and something to say.
For Carlton, that message is a simple, almost sisterly, "You got this." "That's the way it is, love," she sings on "House of Seven Swords", breaking the fourth wall with some mild real talk. This is the person I want to hear tell me "shit happens"; the confidence in her voice is very reassuring. Perhaps that is the source of some of Carlton's magic, that she herself is delivering the shaman's prayer she sings about on album opener "Take It Easy". "When heaven wraps around you/ And she will/ Take it easy". Don't mind if I do.
