Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

I've been listening to Pandora Radio lately, opening a literal Pandora's Box of possibilities on my variegated musical horizons.  This turns out to be somewhat of a distraction since I'm always having to stop whatever I'm doing to check out who is playing, inevitably leading to an impulse download followed by a gargantuan iTunes bill at the end of the month.

As I've noted before, I'm a huge Alison Kraus fan, which, for a middle-aged rocker like myself, is a bit of a genre reach, but hey, she did a terrific collaboration with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame and won a Grammy for it.  I'm still waiting for her to do an album with Roger Daltry of the Who, who in my humble opinion, can out sing, and out scream Robert Plant any day of the week.

My Alison Kraus-seeded station on Pandora turned up a 30 year-old Taiwanese-American singer/songwriter named Vienna Teng who records on the indie Zöe/Rounder label.  Let's take a moment to be thankful for indie labels, which may well be the salvation of good music for yet another generation.

Vienna Teng (her actual name is Cynthia Yih Shih) is a Stanford grad who worked as a software engineer for Cisco Systems until 2002 when she quit to pursue a full time music career.  Software engineers come a dime a dozen; decent singer songwriters are nearly an endangered species.

Vienna Teng is a classically-trained pianist with a versatile voice that seamlessly alternates between sultry alto and lilting soprano evocative of Joni Mitchell, sometimes all in the same measure.  Her unique compositional style weds classical, jazz, pop, country, and world music-infused melodies with edgy, often melancholy, poetry.  Topics range from meddling grandmothers, late winter snowfalls, corporate corruption, dead uncles, job burnout, abortion, gay marriage to an "atheist Christmas song," all with a certain postmodern ambiguity that forces you to listen closely.  I don't know too many songwriters who would dare to lead with a line that goes "I died in a car wreck...."  Her jarring juxtaposition of text and tune appears intentionally ironic at times, tweaking the tentative detente between medium and message.  Though her songs sound autobiographical, they are actually a kind of lyrical fiction that hides much more than it reveals.

Needless to say, I'm smitten.

Her latest release is called "Inland Territory."  I suggest you listen to her in chronological order and track her musical development:  Waking Hour (2002), Warm Strangers (2004), Dreaming Through the Noise (2008), and Inland Territory (2009).  There is clearly a progression.