Vanessa Carlton was raised in small-town Pennsylvania. Her piano teacher mother, Heidi Lee, would play Bach and Mozart while she was pregnant with her daughter at least two hours a day.
Vanessa Carlton was 8 years old when she wrote her first song, which was a piano composition. She recalled to American Songwriter: "I wrote the sheet music out too. That was probably the last time I ever wrote out sheet music of something I wrote. It took way longer to write it out than to actually come up with the song. I think it was sort of a minor-y melody about a waterfall. There were no words."
She enrolled at New York City's prestigious School of American Ballet at the age of 14, but it wasn't an enjoyable experience. "I really had a hard time with dance after I went to the School of American Ballet," Carlton explained to The Cleveland Scene. "[It was] just a very intense, kind of fascist school, where I started to hate dancing."
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