Harmonium (Vanessa Carlton Album) - Composition

Composition

Carlton said the album includes darker themes than those present on Be Not Nobody. She said she was past the "diary stage" of songwriting, in which "you're kind of mostly narcissistic and dealing with yourself", and that as one grows up they "start to absorb environment in a different way"; she called the album a reflection of a "different" and "more womanly" perspective of the world, as opposed to the "innocent and girlish" quality of Be Not Nobody. However, she has said that although "things get a bit heavier as you get older", she still has a "lightness of youth" and is "able to be as girlie in ways that I should be." She referred to the album as "bittersweet" rather than "just bitter" and stressed the importance of the lyrics on Harmonium compared to those on Be Not Nobody, which she said was focused more on the music: "I want the lyric to resonate as much as the chord underneath it", she said. She said that instead of an album with "one-two punch songs", she wanted to make an album that engaged people to the point that they want to listen to it repeatedly, and that they would learn something new each time. "hose are the kind of albums I love and that I'll listen to for years and I'll want to listen to every single song on it", she said.

An October 2003 article in Rolling Stone magazine reported that "Private Radio" would likely be the album's lead single, and "San Francisco" the only love song. Carlton was quoted as saying there was "nothing piano recital-y" about the album, which she called "goth ... The Wicca in me has come out ... I've been able to kind of just merge the Wicca and the Eighties chick." This provoked a skeptical response from MetaFilter users, one of whom wrote "this girl needs to buy a clue." Carlton later wrote on her official internet messageboard that the article misrepresented what she was trying to say, and that her fans should ignore what is written in the press about the album until they own it.

"White Houses" describes a young woman coming of age and finding romance, and eventually losing her virginity; "I wanted to write a song that everyone could relate to, about situations that everyone faces". "Annie" is a song Carlton wrote after she met a girl suffering from leukemia while on tour. According to Carlton, "Private Radio" is "a jammin booty rockin' song" about insomnia. She had suffered from the condition for several years, but in October 2004, she said she "sleep like a baby." She said "She Floats" contains "creepy sounding strings" and is about "the kind of the euphoria that someone gets when they're tortured by being dead". She has named "Who's to Say" as "one of the songs on the album I'm most proud of". She dedicated it to "anyone in a relationship that's unapproved of by their mother or government". She said she liked performing the song and that audiences at her shows connected with it. Carlton has named "Afterglow" as a favorite of hers on the album; it is about "letting go anchors of pain". "Papa", a solo vocal-and-piano piece, is not about her own father but a "different kind of daddy". The Fender Rhodes-driven "C'est la Vie" is an "angry" song and the only one on the album not to include the piano, and Carlton has said it is about the single time she was "dumped" and her inability to speak French; she said that to her, the phrase c'est la vie meant "f it", and that it helped her overcome emotional pain during the breakup. She wrote "San Francisco" in the city. "Half a Week Before the Winter" is a Goth-influenced "dark song" that Carlton intended as a metaphor for Charles Darwin's theory and the concept of "survival of the fittest": "Those beautiful animals again could be a symbol for so many things, they die and they shouldn't and I think it's also part my take on the music industry and how so many beautiful things that you do get eaten by the Vampires". Carlton stated in one of her concerts that "She Floats" is about a ghost in her closet, the screaming in the song is her and her producer, Stephan Jenkins screaming. "The Wreckage", the album's closing hidden track, is about Carlton's boredom while driving and her desire to start car accidents.

She said "Morning Sting", a song that was dropped from the album, is about "emotions being so raw in the morning". She excluded from the album because although she did not feel like it was "crappy", she wanted Harmonium to contain a certain amount of songs. The album shares its name with a keyboard instrument, the harmonium, but Carlton said she adopted the word and made her own definition for it; she intended it as a portmanteau of the words harmony and pandemonium to define the approach to the recording of the album, which she described as "kind of an organized, chaotic approach where I wanted to maintain and preserve that wild abandon to creating." Carlton considered working with Be Not Nobody producer and A&M Records president Ron Fair on the album but decided not to do so, although Fair is credited as the album's co-executive producer. She said that much of Fair's "own aesthetic tastes" were present in the arrangements of the songs on Be Not Nobody, in contrast to Harmonium, where "the dominant taste and aesthetic is my own". She cited the influence of live performances on Harmonium, as opposed to the "studio gloss" present on Be Not Nobody, in creating a feeling that is "a little bit rougher around the edges and a bit more comfortable in a raw form"; according to her, the tracks on Harmonium feature a lot of breathing space so that listeners don't feel there is "a million things going on... There's nothing going on that shouldn't be", and consequently, it is very "easy on the ears", organic and simple. Ron Fair himself contrasted the two albums, comparing the "more formal" Be Not Nobody to "Carlton in an elegant party dress" and Harmonium to "her in Birkenstocks and jeans". According to Carlton, because she had more knowledge of the process of recording an album and elements such as arrangements, she had more creative control over Harmonium than Be Not Nobody. She called the album "so much more sonically personal to me" and "my taste exactly. It's exactly how I would arrange everything, as opposed to someone coming in and just dressing up the songs that I wrote."