Vanessa Carlton might have jinxed herself by calling her new series of concert dates the “Future Pain Tour.”
“This is really funny,” Carlton said in an interview ahead of her performances Tuesday and Wednesday at City Winery. “I broke my foot two weeks before the tour started, so maybe it was a premonition. Maybe a better title might now be ‘The Show Must Go On.’ ”
It’s an instinct that Carlton has tapped into over her 23-year career — to simply go on. A recent VICE documentary delving into the story behind her 2002 hit “A Thousand Miles” — the one with that famous twinkling piano intro — demonstrates the perseverance the singer-songwriter developed early on and how music often became her salve.
As a young teenager, the native Pennsylvanian moved to New York City to study dance at the prestigious School of American Ballet but faced issues with the program and retreated, ditching classes and finding herself drawn to the piano in the dormitories.
“Music was my escape,” she says in the documentary. “It was something where I didn’t have to follow any rules, and it was something I’d turn to.”
Eventually, a rough cassette demo wound up in the hands of legendary music exec Ahmet Ertegun. Soon, Carlton was signed to Interscope by label head Jimmy Iovine. At one point in the film, it’s explained that Carlton, unhappy with her A&R team, flew to Los Angeles to meet with Iovine to declare she no longer was going to work with the personnel.
No one did that sort of thing. But Carlton did. The move and her bravado paid off for the singer-songwriter. She was linked up with a new producer, the effusive Ron Fair, who reshaped her debut album “Be Not Nobody” and its marquee track “A Thousand Miles” (originally named “Interlude”).
“I thought it was really well done,” she said. “To see other people interviewed was interesting, too. We all have our own version of our story, and it’s an extraordinary position to be in to see everybody else’s.”
She’s referring to the circumstances of filming the documentary at the height of the pandemic. when she was living with her parents, her husband, young daughter and their dog Sinatra. To help pass time, she was also substituting at her daughter’s school and working on her latest album, the gripping “Love Is An Art,” her sixth release.
This was in 2020, shortly after she made her Broadway debut playing Carole King in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.”
“There’s no harder thing I’ve ever done,” Carlton said of the production.
Though she had started out as a ballet dancer and taken to the stage many times, she had never acted. One week before the premiere, she said she had a complete anxiety attack: “I wondered why did I think I could do this? But I loved bringing my take to it. Being a singer-songwriter myself, I tried to bring what I could to that role in my way.”
At 23, Carlton said she also had the privilege of doing a writing session with King.
“I was such an idiot then, I can’t even imagine what I was trying to do,” she said.
Carlton found another A-List collaborator in Stevie Nicks. They met through Iovine and became so close that Nicks officiated at Carlton’s wedding in 2013 to Deer Tick frontman John McCauley. She toured last fall with Nicks as her opener for several shows.
Carlton’s return on the Future Pain Tour is her first headlining jaunt in five years. The name comes from a track on her “Love Is An Art” album, songs inspired by the 1956 book “The Art of Loving” by philosopher Erich Fromm.
“It’s really about the way we connect and communicate with each other,” Carlton said. “We want love and all the good stuff. But the things we do to each other sometimes goes against our goals. The communication surrounding love is such an art. I think there’s some semblance of future/present/past pain that’s what we all share, it’s a part of everyone’s life story. And you just have to figure out a way to live through it.”
