Born on August 16, 1980, in Mitford, PA, Vanessa's parents were musicians in their own right, Her father, a pilot, played the fiddle, and her mother was a pianist, and a teacher. At the tender age of two, Carlton was enrolled into a Montessori school "I remember running and drawing pictures all the time. Music and art were the main focuses of my childhood."
After learning how to play "It's A Small World After All" on the piano, her mother decided to teach her a wide variety of composers such as Debussey, Mozart, and Eric Satie. At age eight she wrote her first piano piece.
At nine, she began having a passion for Ballet, while her mother kept her up on the piano, she also started traveling to New York and studied Ballet dancers and teachers such as Grelsey Kirkland and Madame Nenette Charisse.
She was accepted to the School of American Ballet in New York City at age fourteen, she left her family and moved into a dorm room at Lincoln Center and enrolled in Professional Children's School for High School and "Began a new life". In the beginning, she was confident with her dancing, but eventually started to feel the pressures of it during her senior year. At seventeen she started to write songs again. She skipped ballet classes to play her piano, which was in the kitchen of her dorm room. During this time she began writing lyrics, as she had always loved to sing, but didn't think of herself as a singer until she wrote her lyrics.
The fall after she graduated, Vanessa moved into an apartment with a friend, and got a job as a waitress, and played gigs downtown. A year later Carlton signed with Interscope, Geffen, A&M Records. She began recording her first album, Be Not Nobody which was released in March of 2002. That album produced two hits, A Thousand Miles and Ordinary Day. Also the same year, she was featured with The Counting Crows in a song called "Big Yellow Taxi".
After her debut, Vanessa was named one of the Top 10 artists to watch for 2002 by the Rolling Stone calling her a "pop-oriented Fiona Apple"and also praising her for her "serious formal skills at the keyboard" and her ability to keep her music "busy with classical florishes, rich voicings and harmonies reminescent of Tori Amos".
Vanessa continued on to go to Columbia University, where she started dancing again for herself. She has not produced another album as of yet, but don't be too surprised if this talented artist decides she wants to put another on the shelves.
