Vanessa Carlton opens up about her struggle with 'freedom'

Vanessa Carlton recently got candid and made a surprising confession about the success of her debut single A Thousand Miles.

For those unaware, Carlton dropped her first single song, A Thousand Miles, in 2001, which secured a special spot in the music world.

Reflecting on handling unexpected success, the 45-year-old American singer-songwriter and pianist told PEOPLE magazine that she was feeling mixed emotions at that time.

She revealed, "I went through a really bad period with it. Maybe it's interactions with certain people and how they would ask me to play. For a certain period there, it was like a burden to bear because it was my own burden that I created."

The core reason why the Liberman songstress saw it as a burden was because she was struggling to “find freedom.”

“I couldn't figure out how to find freedom. I needed to disconnect myself from all of that in order to move forward,” Carlton explained.

Also, she used to not consider herself “a very good pop star,” and she was surviving with her “own success” that started to reflect in how she dealt with the song’ success.

The Pretty Baby hitmaker has now become “really good at surviving failure. I've gotten very good at that. Especially as a ballet dancer, every day in class you are failing.”

However, “surviving success is a different thing because we live in this schadenfreude type of society where it's like, 'Oh, you're [at the top]. I'm going to take you down now.' So, to a certain extent, it feels like a burden," she elaborated.

It is important to mention that Vanessa Carlton now believes that A Thousand Miles played a huge role in making her who she is in the music industry and her seventh studio album, Veils, is evidence of it, which she dropped on April 17, 2026.