On her second album,
Harmonium, singer/songwriter
Vanessa Carlton enlists her boyfriend,
Stephan Jenkins -- best-known as the frontman of the popular post-grunge band
Third Eye Blind -- as a producer and co-songwriter, and his presence doesn't so much alter
Carlton's music as give it a sharper, direct focus.
Carlton and
Jenkins focus on the lush, dramatic teen-age angst that made "A Thousand Miles" a big hit in 2002, using that song as the template for a collection of songs that are intimate on a grand scale.
Carlton's songs often read like diary entries, dealing with such familiar adolescent themes as love and longing, and they sound even smaller when delivered in her thin but appealing girlish voice, but they gain stature when married to the cinematic arrangements, driven by her insistent, circular piano and dressed by light layers of strings, guitars, and vocal overdubs. Where her
Be Not Nobody debut could sound endearingly awkward,
Harmonium is confident and somber, a conscious attempt to be serious and mature. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine