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From The Desk Of Vanessa Carlton: At All Times (How To Deal With Having A Hit Song From A Long, Long Time Ago)

Liberman is Vanessa Carlton’s latest solo set and fifth overall. With classical-motif tracks like “Blue Pool,” “Take It Easy” and backward-masking-dense closer “Ascension,” Carlton has seriously upped her game, and is now composing complex etudes that easily eclipse her chiming Grammy-nominated hit from 2002, “A Thousand Miles.” Carlton will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our feature on her.

HitSong

Carlton: If you are in the strange position of having a song that everybody knows that you wrote when you were 16 years old but are now a 35-year-old woman and sound nothing like you did in the past, then I have two tips. One: In order to not feel trapped by people’s perception of you and not stunt your growth and curiosity as an artist, it is important to pretend that you’ve never had a hit. Forget that it ever happened. Proceed onwards with your creative process with no obligation to your past. Two: If you are a performer and you seem to have a crowd that is 90 percent full of fans that are only interested in your new material and the remaining 10 percent of these people are attending your show for nostalgic reasons and/or don’t give a shit about anything except that one song that they know, then play your hit song first. If anyone leaves then you’ve successfully and peacefully separated the men from the boys.

Video after the jump.