Vanessa Carlton

Vanessa Carlton's first single, the grandly symphonic "A Thousand Miles," gave the singer/songwriter a career-defining smash in 2002, becoming such a big hit that it threatened to overshadow the rest of her body of work. "A Thousand Miles" turned out to be something of an outlier in Carlton's music. Although she would retain her melodic sense of craft, she gradually drifted away from mainstream music over the course of the 2000s, trading lush surroundings for spare, artful settings. The transition began on 2011's Rabbits on the Run and crystallized on Liberman, a 2015 indie al...