Vienna Teng laughs when I characterize as “meteoric” her leap from being a cubicle-dwelling software engineer to her current career as a full-time performing artist. Appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman, NPR’s Weekend Edition, and CNN aren’t everyday occurrences, after all. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a natural progression for a talented singer/songwriter/pianist who seems to have fallen into high-tech by accident-but managed to escape the dot-com crash with her spirit (though not her stock options) intact.
Fortunately, the 26-year-old bailed out of the land of Dilbert none too soon, having been unhappily employed at Cisco Systems for just two years before abandoning ship. Graduating from Stanford University in 2000 with a degree in computer science just as the dot-com bubble was about to burst, her timing ironically turned out to be fortuitous.
“My stock options were underwater, I’m not really liking the job anyway, and there’s the option of doing the music career… I guess I feel lucky in that I was never tempted [to stay],” she laughs.
Teng even describes her choice of major as being almost an accident: “It was fun writing these things that would run on my computer and I started doing more complicated stuff, so I thought, well, I’m doing it a lot, I might as well major in it.”
It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for computer science as a career path, but then again, Teng had considered performing music professionally as far back as high school. While applying to college, she’d asked her parents if she could take a year off to try a career in music. The answer, predictably, was no. Still, the San Francisco native continued to write and perform during her college years, her lush piano songs forming the basis for her first album, Waking Hour.
Through word of mouth, the album was eventually picked up by tiny Boston-based label Virt Records in 2002. By the time Rounder imprint Zoe Records (which is releasing her latest CD internationally, including here in Canada) came calling, she’d already quit her software engineering job to promote her music full-time.
Then the media took notice: she was featured on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, which led to a spot on the Letterman show, and finally a profile on CNN. Still, she recognizes that such attention is the exception.
“It’s great to have that exposure, but all this stuff happens in the stratosphere-you come back down and you still have to do the groundwork. You still go on the road and play for 15 people in Arizona, and ten people in New Mexico, and maybe 25 people in Texas. And you celebrate the 25 people,” she chuckles.
While she describes Waking Hour as mostly autobiographical, her latest release, Warm Strangers, is rooted more in fiction.
“The reason I gave the album that title is that a lot of the songs came from getting a glimpse of somebody but not really knowing a whole lot about them, and [then] going home and trying to fill in the blanks… In that sense they become warm-blooded, breathing people to me, after I have invented this whole history for them,” she says, evoking a comparison to Aimee Mann’s complex character studies.
While clearly in a contemporary folk-pop vein, Teng’s piano-based songs are richly infused with sensibilities from her classical background.
“I wanted to not do the default thing, which would have been drums, guitar, bass, and piano,” she explains. “I grew up in a classically-trained background and I’ve always liked strings, but not just playing whole notes in the background. It ended up being a very classical instrument-driven pop-rock record [with] not a whole lot of guitar, and that was deliberate on my part.”
Amusingly enough, despite having left computing behind, she still describes herself as a bit of a geek-musically, that is. Although she tries to just take in and appreciate songs during the first few listens, she inevitably winds up examining them in minute detail, even using the Pause and Play buttons on a CD player to transcribe lyrics-“then I’m interpreting them as I go, so I know what the song’s about”-and then dissecting the chord progressions.
“Now and again I’ll hear a song and think, ‘Wow, that’s really cool, and they’re doing something interesting, and I don’t know what!’ and then I’ll sit down and realize, ‘I’ve never seen anyone go from this chord to that chord before,’ and that’s what makes it have that nice little twist,” she exclaims. “I get a kick out of discovering things like that!”
Vienna Teng plays The Drake Hotel Underground tomorrow (Oct. 25) at 7:30 pm. Tickets ($15) available at the door.
