Vienna Teng

Blue, blue caravan,
Winding down to the valley of lights,
My true love is a man
Who would hold me for ten thousand nights.
In the wild, wild wailing of wind,
He's a house 'neath a soft, yellow moon.
So, blue, blue caravan,
Won't you carry me down to him soon?

—Vienna Teng, "Blue Caravan"

Vienna Teng is a Bay Area singer/songwriter who works in a style she likes to call chamber-folk. A classically trained pianist, she left a job at Cisco Systems to write and record music full-time. She has taken to touring in the past few years, often accompanied by professional percussionist Alex Wong, who co-produced Inland Territory with her.

Discography:

• 2002 - Waking Hour
• 2004 - Warm Strangers
• 2006 - Dreaming Through the Noise
• 2009 - Inland Territory
• 2010 - The Moment Always Vanishing (live album)

Vienna Teng provides examples of the following tropes:

• After the End: Enough to Go By, through Word of God.
• Alternate Universe: No Gringo, where-in Americans are trying to get across the border into Mexico because America's economy collapsed. Oh, wait.
• Album Title Drop: Recessional provides the title to Dreaming Through the Noise:

And she dreams through the noise, her weight against me

• • The live album The Moment Always Vanishing gets its title from Antebellum, which originally appeared in Inland Territory:

In the fall we circle through the leaves
And talk about the little ones
And we smile, but never say too much
The moment always vanishing

• Amazing Freaking Grace: The penultimate line of "Recessional" is "oh words like rain, how sweet the sound," sung almost exactly to the familiar tune.
• Anachronic Order: Recessional is backwards.
• Asian and Nerdy: Alludes to model minority stereotypes in Grandmother Song ("All the good boys, baby, they're in grad school.") Teng herself attended Stanford as an undergrad and worked for Cisco as a software engineer before seriously pursuing music.
• Audience Participation Song: Enough to Go By was supposed to be, before Vienna realized that audiences do not have eidetic memories. Soon Love Soon is her more successful attempt at this.
  • Grandmother Song is her most recent example, since Vienna tends to let the audience clap the beat for her.
• Bawdy Song: Subverted in 1BR/1BA, in that the narrator is none too happy about the bawdiness.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Whatever You Want is built entirely around this trope.
• Blue and Orange Morality: Watershed paints Nature as an omnipotent being who doesn't seem to care what the insignificant humans do with her world.
• Breather Episode: Passage, one of Vienna's eeriest and saddest songs, is placed between the heartwarming lullaby Anna Rose and the soft, pleasant Atheist Christmas Carol (which, despite what its title might suggest, is not an Author Tract).
• Ceiling Banger / Right Through the Wall: 1BR/1BA.

My upstairs neighbors are making sounds that I never want to hear
I hope they're just moving furniture around and really liking their ideas

• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The man described in Whatever You Want is implied to be one of these.
• Double Meaning Title: Vienna actually built an entire song (I Don't Feel So Well) out of the well/good grammatical nitpick.
• Education Grandmama: Grandmother Song, as every 2nd-gen Asian immigrant kid can relate, although the song gives damn good reason.
• Emotionless Girl: The above-mentioned "I Don't Feel So Well."
• Fading Into the Next Song: "Shasta" into "Homecoming" on Warm Strangers.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Averted in Watershed. It's not that Nature hates humanity - it's just that she doesn't care.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Played with ambiguously in Shasta.
• Intercourse with You: "Momentum". Vienna noted this at a concert once after sharing with the audience that a publication reviewing her first album had described it as "Music to get you into a woman's pants."
• Isn't It Ironic?: Narrowly Averted when Vienna convinced a friend not to use Between as the first dance at a wedding.
• Lyrical Dissonance: Shasta. It sounds like such a cheerful, upbeat, fun song, until you realize it's about an abortion.
  • Also see Between. Beautiful waltz that a friend of Vienna's was planning to use at her wedding until Vienna pointed out the song's meaning.
• Mood Whiplash: The last three songs of Warm Strangers go from heartwarming, to eerie and depressing, and back to heartwarming.
• Morality Ballad: Whatever You Want, a song about an Enron-esque CEO.
• My Beloved Smother: Present (maybe) in My Medea.
• Non-Appearing Title: About half of her songs.
• Persecution Flip: No Gringo
• Posthumous Narration: Passage.
• Reincarnation Romance: In Another Life.
• Rule of Three: Between is described as having been written in a very clever stage of her life, being a waltz in three verses with three vocal parts, the melody coming between the two harmony lines.
• Shown Their Work: Radio. Aside from amassing what must be a very questionable search history looking up suicide bombings, Vienna includes real casualty totals from Israel and Palestine as whispered numbers along with the aforementioned triage codes.
• Shrug of God: She has a habit of letting listeners form their own meanings with regards to her songs.
• Sleep Cute: Recessional:

"In the terminal she sleeps on my shoulder, hair falling forward, mouth all askew..."

• Sorry, I'm Gay: The back story of Unwritten Letter #1
• Spiritual Successor: Watershed explores Pontchartrain's theme from a much more inhuman perspective.
• Stage Names: "Vienna" after the city's illustrious musical history, and "Teng" to reflect her Chinese heritage
• Survival Mantra: Two in "Radio": It's just the radio, darling, just the radio and We are not some Third World country...this is not some Third World country...
• Tarot Motifs: The Tower
• Triang Relations: One possible interpretation of Between.
• The Something Song: Grandmother Song
• Uncommon Time: Harbor, which she wrote for her boyfriend, a drummer who loves uneven time signatures.
  • Also notable in her devilishly difficult Signal Fire.
  • The Last Snowfall too.
• World Half Empty: No Gringo can be read this way.
• Yandere: 'My Medea' is told from the perspective of one.
• Yuri Genre: City Hall, especially as acted by Marika Hughes and Dina Maccabee.