by Lara Supan
“It starts with an idea for me, about something that I want to communicate,” Blanton muses while she hangs in her Chicago hotel room. “I feel like I usually start with the point and work backwards.”
Carsie Blanton has been in what she describes as “American Pop” or “Americana” for going on eight years now. Leaving her Virginia home at 16, she moved across country with “a bunch of crazy artists” to start a steady, non-musical career. But soon she realized it was now or never time, and moved to the great city of Philadelphia to cut her singer songwriter teeth.
“I just had the thought that if I don’t try to be a professional musician now I probably will never try it and I’ll always wonder what would have happened. I had some family in Philly and I decided it was a pretty good spot to be a musician because it’s close to so many big cities, and so I thought I would go try it for a year and try to be a singer songwriter.” Blanton attributes her initial musical success to good family, luck and great opportunity.
Recently, however, Blanton was drawn to the Big Easy’s seductive music, and buttery food. It was here that she developed, recorded and released her first album of jazz standards, titled Not Old, Not New. Describing the way the new record came about, Blanton says “I didn’t just want to make a jazz record, I wanted to make a really specific jazz record and I already had the songs picked out and I had a really clear vision for it.” She took some of what she considers the best songs ever written and organized some amazing jazz musicians to back her for her beautiful, simple yet seductive performance of some timeless standards including “Do You Know What it Means (To Miss New Orleans)” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
Now Blanton is on an impressively long tour route, playing roughly 40 shows in 45 days. As a self proclaimed introvert, Blanton describes how playing shows fits in with her lifestyle so well. “It doesn’t feel like I’m at a party when I’m playing a show. I mean being at a party is really exhausting to me, but playing a show it feels like I’m just having a conversation that’s like a one on one conversation and the person on the other side is actually 100 people. It doesn’t feel like I’m fielding all of these personalities and different energies.”
One quite unique aspect of fame that Blanton has is her view on accessibility. When I reached out for an interview, I surprisingly got an e-mail back from not a publicist or manager, but Blanton herself. When asked about this decision, Blanton says “I like to do whatever I can do. I just try to be available to people. I think when people feel connected they should be able to reach out to me.”
This seems to be working rather well for this singer songwriter. For a few years now Blanton has been using a “pay what you want” platform for her music, and making a successful living out of it. In addition to selling her CDs digitally for a name your own price, she also uses the model while touring.
“When I’m touring I can see how people respond to it in real time, because I’ll give a pitch on the stage and I explain how pay what you want works. I go sell CDs at the merch table, so people see me standing in front of them and they just heard me play, so usually people give me whatever they can part with. It depends on what city I’m in and who I’m talking to what amount that is, but people are generally really happy to be generous. It’s not like they’re saying ‘Oh will you take $6 dollars?’ They’re usually saying ‘I have $20 dollars in my wallet so that’s all I can give you’.”
She explains that she had an epiphany back when her career started, that soon there would be no more rock stars on the music scene. “I decided to do it that way because I’m not going to be a rock star, I’m going to share my music with people. That has been my guiding principle, the first and foremost important thing is to share music, and then getting paid for it, for me, is a second priority.”
This second priority has proved to be an easy one to reach, with Blanton recently receiving $60,000 to record Not Old, Not New via a Kickstarter campaign. Her final stretch goal was to play in Australia, so she is headed there in August! Although she says her fan base Down Under is yet to be seen, she had a lot of Kickstarter fans interested in having her play in their country so she is confident she will have a memorable time.
Coming up very soon, Blanton will be playing Ardmore Hall in Philly on July 19th and Washington, DC on the 20th. She can’t wait to be playing with a full band a couple talented opening acts. “We’ll do some songs from the jazz record with the saxophonist who is on the record and a great drummer from New Orleans, and upright bass and keys and we’ll do a lot of originals as well.”
Speaking of her originals, she has numerous extremely eloquent songs loaded onto her previous albums. Blanton’s songwriting style is quirky and unique, including a lot of playful metaphors and analogies. “I start with the point of a song and often the point, for me, is metaphor or an analogy of something that kind of clicks, and I think ‘Oh, this thing that I’m experiencing is also like this other thing!’ and that will be central imagery or symbolism of the song.”
As an avid believer in open sexuality and embracing one’s sensuality, many of Blanton’s songs tackle the themes of love and sex. “I started writing about sex in my blogs a couple years ago now and I feel like through that process of writing about it and becoming more public about my feelings about it, it’s really empowered me to include my interest in sex as part of my public personality and not feel like it’s such a shameful, taboo thing to talk about.”
When asked what Blanton would be doing after her tour was over, she replied simply “Sleep!” And she’s also prepping herself for another original album coming in the form of multiple singles scattered through the winter of 2014. Make sure to check out Carsie Blanton as she passes through on the 19th before she gets swept away by her yet unknown Aussie fan base!
