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San Francisco Singer-Songwriter Brings Her Talents to a Boil

Vienna Teng. Photo by Eric Cheng and Adam Tow.

By Mayur Deshmukh | Special to AsianWeek

Vienna Teng plays piano — has since she was five. She started making up songs when she was six and added some lyrics in junior high. She tried drawing, she tried softball and they just didn’t take.

When she arrived at Stanford University in 1996, she put her music on the back burner and began the busy life of a pre-med student. Two years into college she switched over to computer science and by the time she graduated in 2000, she had also picked up a minor in American History.

Somewhere over the course of her education, though, Teng turned up the heat on that back burner. It started at the piano in the lounge of her dorm sophomore year — mostly at two in the morning with an audience gathering by word of mouth. While studying to be a software engineer, she let her music simmer to a slow, steady boil, so that by the time she graduated, she had put out a four-song demo and laid down the 13 tracks that were to become her acclaimed debut CD, Waking Hour.

That first album was originally released in May of 2001 and re-released — with three tracks revamped in a Nashville studio — in November 2002, after she signed with the small, Seattle-based independent music label, Virt Records. Waking Hour has achieved best-seller status on CD Baby, been distributed nationally at Tower Records and Virgin Megastores, and is climbing the sales rankings at Amazon.com.

Waking Hour is good. The songs are reminiscent of Tori Amos and Sarah McLaughlin, both of whom she is frequently compared to and whom she sites as major influences, along with Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Elton John and classical musicians, most strongly Chopin. The tracks are all well-constructed, with her piano creating hypnotic melodies for smart and insightful lyrics. Her recognizable narrators are her friends, and she makes each one come to life during their respective songs. Particularly on the re-mixed tracks, strings, percussion and synthesizers add mythical sonic depths to her songs. She sings with a strong voice that carries the listener and conjures the seasons she frequently returns to in her words.

“I was joking with a friend the other day,” Teng said over omelets at Rock Soup, “that maybe I just have a weakness for Robert Frost imagery.” There is distinct flavor of Frost in her work, which the Saratoga, Calif. native finds curious, but appropriate. “I tend to think of nature a lot when I think of metaphors. Whenever I’m trying to capture what an emotion is or what a sentiment is like or what a moment is like, usually the imagery that comes to mind most easily is something about snow, or about rain, or about sunlight at a particular time of year. It may also be because I’ve never lived on the East Coast but I’ve always wanted to. So maybe it’s my longing for that coming out.”

This coming year, Teng will see the East Coast: She’ll be heading out there on tour in the spring. When she goes, she’ll take with her a growing repertoire of songs she performs live. It’s been nearly two years since the original release of the album, and she says she’ll be ready to start recording a second album sometime in 2003.

This past year, the album has earned Teng a front page spread in the Arts and Entertainment section of the San Jose Mercury News. She has played evenings of music at hotspots all around the bay — Red Rocks Café, Espresso Garden, Global Village, Bazaar, Rock Soup — and is selling out shows with greater frequency. And as she brings her long-stewing music towards the front of her stove, she seasons it with performance.

Following college, Teng moved to Mountain View and took a job at Cisco Systems. While the dot-conomy was going bust, her work team was turning a profit. While prospering at Cisco, she began moonlighting, playing shows, paid her dues behind the tip jar and bought herself a Yamaha P-80 — an electric keyboard that she says is the closest thing she found to the grand piano sound. In May, she moved up to the Mission District of San Francisco. In August she left her job to tend to her music full-time.

Teng’s career is just starting. By day, she’s her own booking agent, “Which means,” she says, “that I do a lot of phone calling and sending out packages and working on graphics programs so I can put together press kits. A lot of that, and a lot of driving around, meeting people, talking about setting up shows and setting up tours.”

By night, she is taking in the San Francisco scene. And the San Francisco scene is enjoying her presence. “Originally,” said Teng, “I guess I was more of a studio artist. The audience made me nervous. Even when I was playing the piano in the lounge at school, I would block out the people listening and just focus on the keys.” These days, though, she has come to love and play for her listeners. “I started to realize what musicians meant when they would talk about the energy they get from the crowd.” Now she regularly plays two-hour shows, introducing her songs with a familiarity that is also evident in her singing.

Even though Teng is just 24, the singer-songwriter has the temperament of a much older musician, and, it seems, the staying power to become that older musician.

For more information go to www.viennateng.com.