Vanessa Lee Carlton (born August 16, 1980 in Milford, Pennsylvania) is a Jewish-American pop and rock singer, songwriter, and pianist best known for the hit song "A Thousand Miles", a single from her platinum-selling debut album Be Not Nobody (2002). Carlton's second album, Harmonium (2004), was a commercial failure, leading her to part company from her record label. She currently resides in San Francisco with her producer-boyfriend, Stephan Jenkins (lead singer of Third Eye Blind), and she began production on her third album in late 2005.
According to her own short handwritten autobiography, posted on her official website in 2001, Carlton began playing the piano as a toddler. After returning from Disneyland at the age of two, Carlton played "It's A Small World" on the piano. This event inspired Carlton's mother to expose Carlton to various classical composers such as Mozart and Eric Satie. She went to ballet school in New York City beginning at age 12. The stress and rigid training in the ballet lessons proved too much for her, and she chose not to become a ballerina after graduating from the academy. She attended Columbia University and performed in bars and clubs all over Manhattan. Carlton met Peter Zizzo at a singer-songwriter circle and a few months later, Zizzo invited Carlton to his studio to begin recording a demo with instruments accompany Carlton's piano and vocals. Three months after recording the demo tape, Carlton was signed onto Interscope Records where she began recording the album Rinse, which was never released. Rinse has twelve tracks, including songs that later appeared on her debut album, Be not Nobody, in slightly reworked form, such as "Ordinary Day", "Rinse", "Pretty Baby", "Twilight", "Interlude" (later entitled "A Thousand Miles"); songs that remain unreleased in any form, except for Internet bootlegs (which exist for at least seven of the twelve tracks), such as "All I Ask" and "Superhero"; and one song, "Carnival", which was later reworked as "Dark Carnival" for the Sony PlayStation game Spy Hunter 2. According to an interview in the February 2006 Teen Vouge, she also recently completed the New York City ING marathon in 2005. She donated the pledge money she collected to Musicians on Call, a nonprofit organization that brings live and recorded music to patients' bedsides
