Vanessa Carlton - Rabbits On The Run (2011)

Shifting to indie Razor & Tie after a four-year hiatus following her 2007 album, Heroes & Thieves, Vanessa Carlton turns inward on her fourth album, Rabbits on the Run. Embracing all the spectral elements that ran underneath the surface of her music, Carlton avoids any of the surging orchestrations or any suggestions of cheer, spending long stretches of the album alone with her piano, and when the arrangements are fleshed-out, they’re done so subtly that it often seems as if she’s singing alone in the studio. Even if it has the effect of turning Rabbits on the Run into something of an unintentional Tori Amos homage, it’s an appropriately austere setting for Carlton’s melancholy introspections, ruminations that don’t offer any easy way inside. Unlike “A Thousand Miles” or the two albums that dealt with the repercussions of her initial success, this is music made with no audience in mind: it is strikingly personal, to the extent that it suggests that Carlton needs to get this soul-searching out of her system in order to move forward.