Imagine a sun-streaked beach in early evening, awash in late-summer afterglow. At the water’s edge stands a young woman, her flushed face and salt-kissed hair showing evidence of a swim or a secret tryst. A boy strides into the far corner of the frame. Is he a stranger? The one she’s hoping to see?

Somewhere, her parents are sipping pinot grigio; somewhere, a friend is getting into trouble. Music floats on the breeze, the whisper of strings and the soft notes of a piano. The girl starts to sing. Her voice is like any girl’s, but perfected. She turns away, a tentative decision clouding her eyes. A Trojan condom commercial interrupts. Tune in next time for more.

Vanessa Carlton evokes scenes such as this because her music is so much like the dramas on primetime WB programs. It’s easy to compare her second album to the work of predecessors Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, or peer Alicia Keys. Like those ladies, she’s an ivory tickler with one foot in higher art (she was once a serious danseuse) and one in classic pop-rock (she’s buds with ’50s and ’60s hitmaker Carole King), writing songs that are both confessional and willfully poetic. But more useful correlations come from the worlds of Everwood and Smallville.

Carlton has a gift for creating vignettes. The vengeful “C’est La Vie” or the giddy lovers’ holiday “San Francisco” focus on narrative more than mood or virtuosity, making space for a listener to find herself (maybe even himself) among well-wrought characters. But her mini-dramas are so beautifully structured, so artfully played out, that they don’t leave room for what makes pop music different from, say, TV — the beautiful disorder of individuality.

Take “White Houses,” the record’s inspired first single. Beginning like a children’s song, with Carlton playing rudimentary lines and singing in a nursery-rhyme cadence, this tale gets a kick from a bright, un-girly 4/4 beat and a dynamic build-up that feels a lot like the teenage summer sex described in the lyrics. Little details — the familiar image of five friends sharing a single house, the impudence that meets longing in Carlton’s voice when she sings, “Maybe you’ll remember me” — lend immediacy. Yet the song’s incredibly tight structure makes it feel slightly generic, populated by actors instead of real kids. Precision makes “White Houses” more accessible. But it also makes the story feel impersonal, like an invention rather than an experience.

In fact, Harmonium isn’t all Carlton’s; it’s a collaboration between the singer and her sweetheart, Stephan Jenkins, who has been creating similarly airtight, clever pop with his band, Third Eye Blind, since the post-grunge ’90s. The 40-year-old Jenkins might be offended by the idea that he’s playing Svengali to the 24 year old, but there’s no doubt that, Henry Higgins-style, he has taught her a few things about articulation.

The interplay between Carlton’s sugar and Jenkins’s old salt dominates the album: Punchy drumming counters lush strings on “Private Radio”; nightclubbing bass and keyboards break through ethereal backing vocals on “C’est La Vie”; literal screams puncture the grand climax of “She Floats.” It’s the perfect balance to represent a coming of age.

With help from someone who’s been through it all and had time to think about it twice, Carlton has made music for growing-ups that is neither cloying nor pretentious. And just as Everwood and Smallville sometimes get sneakily serious, Carlton touches on deeper matters as well, like depression and youthful mortality, within her little stories of romance.

Like those hour-long glimpses of teen angst and perfection, Harmonium offers casual satisfaction to most, and deep meaning to truly devoted fans. Yet a sneaking sense remains that she can reach deeper. Her music needs more accidents, more desperation or real joy to complement her perfectionism. When she reaches that aspect of her gift, Carlton will succeed beyond prime time.

DOWNLOAD THESE: “C’est La Vie,” “Annie,” “Who’s to Say”