The Story of "A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton

[Music] music was my escape it was something i didn't have to follow any rules i had something to turn to i started writing more elaborate songs i wrote the little riff thing [Music] and i just went that's a hit sweetie making my way downtown walking how did you know i love this song that song changed my life forever this is the enchilada right here i played it over and over and over again boom number one record a thousand miles kept like a giant snowball gaining in size and scope every year after that it got bigger and bigger in your mind you get exactly what you want and it's actually not what you want they were gonna drop me because they didn't like how the first record was sounding they wanted her to just sit down and be quiet and do whatever she was told i was so young you're just like you just take whatever you can get you're like i don't have any control over how this is going on you don't want to complain about such luck and such success it does come at a price though you know the expression biting the hand that feeds you i will bite it all day long [Music] sinatra this is sinatra psychotic kangaroo so i've been staying with my parents during quarantine and it's been interesting mom mom yeah it can hear you sorry i just hope i don't say anything she doesn't want me to say it's a long story of what happened i don't even know where to begin here's some of her music books from her album be not nobody and this is uh vanessa when she was 16. i always knew vanessa would have a tremendous career as an artist that's her at one playing that was vanessa two in piano class by the time she was seven there was piano and there was ballet class every day i'm from pennsylvania but i moved to new york city to study ballet the school of american ballet i was turning 14. the school of american ballet at the time and this is like this is the 90s it was tough there's a lot of problems with the school then i i really started having trouble i started to skip classes i really didn't like a lot of the things that i saw that were going on but i had music i had music i had something to turn to in the dorm there was an old piano so i would go there and i started writing more elaborate songs instead of going to class music was my escape it was something i didn't have to follow any rules it was this other feeling i was getting when i would play that i didn't get when i danced anymore this yamaha upright was the piano in my parents sunroom that i wrote a thousand miles on so the main part of this song that i had for a long time was just this it's really an instrumental song you know [Music] that was that was the whole thing it was the summer she was turning 17 i was in the kitchen and she was playing and then she did the riff of of a thousand miles and i just went that's a hit sweetie the chorus the pre-chorus and the verse it's all really a variation on the [Music] on welcome to our home the song is about a crush i had on a juilliard student i would never talk to this person i was very shy i was like there's just no way in god's creation that this would ever happen so the idea of like you have a better chance of falling up than ever having a relationship with this person i can't say the person's name because they're like a famous actor and i don't want to say they know the songs about them no [Music] that is what you call magic it's beautiful thanks mom i made a demo tape of the song interlude which is now a thousand miles i got a job in a restaurant and just tried to i guess i was just trying to get a record deal i just thought if i if i have someone supporting me or a company supporting me i'll be able to do this for a living and then i could quit my waitressing job i did a couple showcases for some different labels and i ended up being signed by jimmy ivy with interest cup the first time i met vanessa was in the offices at interscope a m records where i worked and then she came in and she was just full of excitement and creativity and had really strong ideas about how she saw herself as an artist michelle thomas was one of those people at the label there i just wanted to go to her office and hang out we just connected and she was so wonderful to me so for me and vanessa it was like we were a team she had a vision i wanted to support it so even if i sat in meetings and some man said make her boobs bigger make her butt higher we just kind of let them say whatever and then vanessa and i would go do photos basically what happened was my dream came true i got this record deal i thought it was gonna you know it's gonna be this amazing situation and in your mind you get exactly what you want and it's actually not what you want at the end of the day i was in a really bad situation with the people that i was working with and it was not it was not good she was working with another anr person she just having a difficult time with there was a lot of weirdness a lot of possessiveness that was happening so i told my manager at the time that i don't want to work anymore with this guy and he said to me if you tell jimmy that you don't work with the a r guy you're going to be dropped i decided against my manager's advice that i would fly to la and have a meeting with jimmy if he would take the meeting and tell him that i don't want to work for the a r guy anymore people would be afraid to walk into jimmy's office jimmy iveen was the head of interscope geffen and a m records the largest label at the time and vanessa didn't care she was going to go in and she was going to speak up for herself and she was going to say her piece so jimmy met with me and i said i don't want to work with this person anymore they weren't happy with the record anyway i don't know what you want to do with me but i can't move forward with this team anymore it would be easy to see the artist being dropped after making that move to go in and speak to the head of the company i know that they were you know considering dropping me but he ended up linking me with ron somewhere here we have my homes christina don't [ __ ] with my heart a thousand miles there it is presents the certificate to royal and fair in recognition of your nomination for best instrumental arrangement accompanying vocalists a thousand miles vanessa carlton 45th grammys award year 2002. so that's the one that i trashed the hotel room over because i really really really wanted to win the first time i became aware of vanessa carlton was when jimmy iovine gave me this brown paper bag of demo cds that were basically the scrap heap these were the cds of the artists that had been signed and had been working but it wasn't gonna come to fruition they were never gonna see the light of day and he said ron check these out and let me know like are we good to go with the end in that bag was vanessa carlton's cd this is the enchilada right here the genuine enchilada this might have been a first iteration of the record i don't even know what it was but it was the first thing that i heard i'd never seen her name before putting the cds in the walkman i went through a few of them and then i put the one in from vanessa carlton and i just played it i came to this song which was seventh on the cd and it wasn't even called a thousand miles it was called interlude it played you know the famous intro on piano and the demo thousand miles played i hit replay and i hit replay and i hit replay and i hit replay and i hit replay i called jimmy and i say there's a [ __ ] smash on this we cannot drop this artist there's a [ __ ] smash i played it for an hour and a half so i asked if i could meet with vanessa carlton and discuss with her the idea of re-recording the song and not dropping her at all but starting anew ron fair was like this over the top you know big outfits he was a real music lover and he he was the one that heard interlude and said you know that should be a single mainly i needed vanessa to agree if not bless okay i'm going to work with ron and we're going to see where this goes you know in all fairness to vanessa i i don't think she had much of a choice i think it was our way or the highway at that time and she was probably just excited that something good could happen ron was the president of a m at the time and a m was a part of it it was a group with an interscope so he kind of worked with vanessa to tweak the music that she'd already done to really get a solid record together but in that process he called and he told me about her he was really excited about her he thought she was incredibly talented he thought that she had really great songs everything became about vanessa carlton and we swung into action this is the exact score that was used to copy out individual parts for the recording session for a thousand miles so that's the money like that's done those are the repeat marks and there's the wonder with the crescendo they're two swells piano forte piano fortissimo we set up a basic track session to articulate the composition in a way that made it have more impact and more power and make the transitions powerful and you know find the little gems inside the track so let's start we'll do a little musical analysis of this she plays the theme in the front in free time so first four bars of the first verse no bass just piano and drum and then bass comes in here right here those those three notes became this [Music] i want the tension to build you're paddling out you're paddling out you're waiting for the next wave turn around the wave is coming catch the wave surfing boom number one record right from there boom it's a [ __ ] smash right there when she sings that again with that string lick that's where the money the wallets come out right there ron was like a real perfectionist a lot of things felt like a battle i mean they have their ups and downs i think as anyone like vanessa who is super clear in her vision someone like ron who's had multiple successes in his career so there was some head bumping but i think that's kind of normal i remember recording the record and not wanting to go high at the end of the song you really want me to sing that wow would pass me by would piss would pass half an hour of my life she kept saying would pass me by no would pass course three we gotta pay it off so for him the perfection of the song was always the most important thing he goes into the studio he is editing tweaking vocals he's a producer he's a music guy making my way downtown [Music] get your lighters out this is the lighter section so when the record was finished i asked for a meeting with jimmy and i thought thousand miles was like this is too good to be true it's got an orchestra on it it's got all this beautiful harmony on it so i played it for jimmy expecting nothing and he said no no man it's a smash it's a smash the label loved it and they wanted to spend money on a video we decided to make a music video and hire this young cool guy with a vision mark classfield vanessa carlton a thousand miles concept by mark classfelt we were looking for a catchy idea for a video i think it was ron said to me we want her behind a piano we want to make a piano her thing and he's got an idea that we could put a piano on a tracking dolly and that vanessa carlton would be sitting at the piano going through all the different parts of town suburban streets busy freeways empty desert highway a parade and more the possibilities for this are endless when i first came up with the concept i thought i i was wondering how the hell am i going to do this the idea of moving a piano throughout the streets of la seemed a little daunting but he figured it out like we had a flatbed literally rode through the entire city filming that song it was so over the top a video like that could never be made again that was not made on a green screen i think we did shut down some roads but a lot of times we didn't we practically drove with her with just cars you know around her i had a seat belt on under my skirt on this piano that wasn't working that's actually one of my most favorite memories of that time is making that video she just gave this great performance that's the heart of the video and you know i guess the rest is history so now we have the music video we have the song being a new artist it wasn't a guarantee of getting onto mtv and getting in rotation there wasn't a youtube that you can go to there was nothing so it was it was mtv or bust this is pre-internet pre-tick talk pre-pre fortnite pre-spotify pre-pre-pre it's model t everything was at stake when we released the record we had to make it work because i think that there was a list of people who were sitting in the corner waiting for it to not happen so david saslow who was our mtv guy brings the video over there adds it into heavy rotation with no radio and the [ __ ] thing blew up and it became a gigantic smash on mtv better than anything because it has the visuals everybody could say hey did you see that video with the girl with the piano so everybody you know knew it and everybody was talking about it but really the white chicks placement is what took it over the edge michelle thomas called me and she said this is the winds i wrote this movie they want your song to be in the scene they wanted a really pop song for terry crews in the movie he was riding in a car and they needed a really happy pop song for this particular scene and that he was going to be singing it how did you know i love this song wow uh vanessa carlton a thousand miles that song changed my life forever i remember being in vancouver where we shot the movie and all of a sudden the choreography just came it was like and i was like oh you know when you see the whole violins and the whole thing and i was like i need you and i miss you and i was like oh my god and the best best best switch and this has basically been the base of my whole career is the surprise that comes when you find out i am the biggest fan uh of the song of vanessa carlton and when i go into singing it with all my heart and let me tell you something we did that scene in one take it was perfect once that song appeared in the movie every top 40 radio station was playing it in heavy rotation it put fuel to the fire that was already kind of burning underneath i get the call mom everybody knows my name says vanessa put on a hat and looked down thousand miles kept like a giant snowball gaining in size and scope it really did become a cultural thing now you gotta say white chicks was the biggest movie that i had ever done up until that time but slowly but surely everything just started to change for me people would give me my mail like making my way down yeah and they were like do the song do the song it became such a pop culture phenomenon worldwide initially i think it was kind of cool for her to see the song in the movie but i think after a while because it became so associated with the film it felt like it was taking away some of the shine from other things that she was doing like it became all about that one song i think the biggest challenge for someone in my position would be to not look at the power and success of that song to not be like squashed by it oh i mean don't get me wrong i hated this song i hated this i mean you have to understand i had i had to go through this process and and figure out what you know it took like over a decade for me to figure out what all that was and then you know how to continue growing as a person as a as a artist you don't want to complain about such luck and such success it does come at a a price though it's like your first big paper that you wrote in high school and you're a writer okay now you've written books you've written books it's like this little essay you wrote in high school and that's what just gets republished and republished and it's not to say that it's not authentic expression or anything it's like your first draft of anything you've ever written but that's okay the irony of the song is that there's something about it that is so unifying everybody likes that song from what i can tell i mean i'm sure there's many people who hate that song but in general it is this thing and that's what i'm most proud of there's not any culture anywhere that hasn't heard that song and have and has not had an emotional experience and this is the point of what music does that crosses race that crosses uh gender it crosses culture ultimately artists of any medium yes one part of it is absolutely trying to express something you need to create something but the other part of it that we all want is a connection of some sort so yeah that's become like just this main like source of connection for people and that's it doesn't belong to me anymore you know and that's good if i could fall into the sky [Music] if i could just see tonight [Music] it's always time the phrase one hate wonder is like it was always made to be an insult like you're supposed to be so insulted but the whole point of one hit wonder you're wondering how you had a hit at all no one has a hit song and now i wonder if i could fall the motivation was never like let's have a hit single and make a ton of money i could give a [ __ ] it was born out of something that we both shared although maybe never articulated which is love of music thanks to interlude thanks to a thousand miles didn't have to go back to my waitressing job that was the beginning of the dream that i thought that i in my head i think in like the dorm room of my belly school i feel really really grateful that i've been able to carve out the career that i want within this industry by being just fiercely independent and making my little projects and my my records it's not that vanessa's ever been misunderstood it's that she didn't fit into a box that somebody wanted to draw for her sinatra no where is he he's with dad i'm living with my parents now okay what can i say it's a very healing song that's what you're supposed to do make the world a better place give and that's what she did with that song and also she has a loft in new york city because of that song thank you [Music] i'm her mother

Channel: VICE Asia

Views: 450,813

Keywords: culture, docs, documentaries, documentary, exclusive, independent, internet, interview, journalism, lifestyle, story of, underground, vice asia, vice guide, vice videos, vice.com, videos, world

Id: 4QHOTcBfdDc

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021