By JoJo Yang

A supportive family, a new DVD, and a mob of fans: the perks of being Vienna Teng, one of American pop-folk's rising stars.

A note to aspiring music artists: apparently it helps get you noticed if you used to work as a software engineer. Or at least in Vienna Teng's case, it did.

Vienna Teng, née Cynthia Shih, is a singer-songwriter-pianist native to California, born to Taiwanese parents, and raised in Saratoga. Her music, consisting of beautifully soothing and haunting vocals accompanied by her piano harmonies and light acoustics, has been compared to other popular female music artists as Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos, and India Arie, the latter whom she is now touring with. But for Teng, comparing her to say, Sarah McLachlan, isn't really a bad thing, but rather "actually an honor" and something that comes naturally, given that she listened to them in college and that they influenced her musical conception.

To some listeners and people in the music PR circuit, Vienna Teng might also be known for her previous career, or as blogger Angry Asian Man puts it, she is "everyone's favorite software-engineer-turned-singer-songwriter." Two aspects of Teng's story -- being Asian American and having worked at Cisco Systems for two years after college -- have become a sort of hook into her music, things that she's "always been a little confused about," but appreciates nonetheless. She attributes these tags that publicists and journalists have picked up on in part to her success as a music artist, that extra umph that got some listeners interested. But in the end, it was the music, because the "music has to stand on its own eventually." 

Moreover, it seems to have lent listeners a certain level of identifiability. Her audience may tend to be older, but is very diverse; after recent shows, Teng would get mobbed by Asian American families and their children, now young adults who had entered these "conventional high tech careers," or she would hang out with the occasional group of "geeky" computer engineers. Teng attributes the latter set of fans to the fact that they could identify with her more than with any other popular singer-songwriter of a similar sound, an interesting twist that she acknowledges and "chooses not to disavow." But now it's reached a point where she and her friends just roll their eyes and say: "Software engineer, what does that have to do with anything?"

It doesn't. Because her music does stand on its own. Teng's rising popularity has led to the release of her first DVD, Live at World Cafe Live, on August 7, a recording of a performance done at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia in January. The DVD came after requests by fans for a live audio-video recording; given that her "solos and arrangements on the record albums don't reflect the music and energy of the concerts," Teng wanted to put out something representative of what she was doing live. Possible venues for the recording had been narrowed down to Ann Arbor, Michigan and Philly, which was ultimately chosen for its exceptional audiences that Teng described with genuine awe and appreciation as "amazing," lending a "special energy to the performance." That special energy was further augmented when, ironically, fans flew in from all around the country, giving the audience more of a "national representation."

One of the songs on the DVD performance is her cover of "Green Island Serenade," a Chinese song originally on her second album, Warm Strangers, as a hidden track sung a capella. On all three of Teng's albums to date, it is the only song she has recorded in Chinese. The song, which her parents sang to her in her childhood as a sort of lullaby, was added to her performance repertoire when preparing to play at an Asian American event at the San Francisco Public Library. The event organizer strongly suggested that she play a song in Chinese, as a large portion of the audience would be Chinese. Teng, self-professed barely fluent in the language, turned to her parents for ideas:

"Mom, Dad, I'm supposed to do this song in Chinese but I have no idea."

"Well, you know that one song, why don't you try to sing the words."

"And so I started singing the words... and they burst out laughing and just said, 'Okay. No, you don't know the words.'"

So, coached by her parents, Teng created a tribute to her childhood and her heritage that she describes as a "melancholy song of isolation and loss."

Teng finds herself fortunate that her family has been supportive of her in her music career.  While friends may ask, "Hey, how come your parents never come to your shows?" Teng says her mother will buy her albums and give them out on business trips, all in all being quietly supportive, not harping about settling down with a job and a family. 

On staying grounded, Teng notes that family and friends help her enough in this aspect. Her parents "have made a very big point of treating all of their children equally," that being Teng and her two younger siblings, with each of them going in their won desired directions. And her friends and bandmates often tell her that they would much rather get a drink than listen to her riff during encores, a friendly reminder that she's "not the center of the world."

Teng appreciates the gradual increase in visibility that she has received as a musician, noting that it's far more unfortunate when you "put out your first album and suddenly your name is everywhere," which she notes can be "very overwhelming and can do a lot of damage." Whereas in her case, she has been given the time to get used to the stresses that come with increased visibility and popularity, though she admits to writer's block in the creative process, feeling conflicted over tried-and-true crowd-pleasing motifs versus innovative ideas, thinking, "Maybe I should write it like that because they'll applaud louder when I play it like that, or maybe this way it will sound weird."

Plans for the future? Vienna Teng heads to Europe in the fall; initial plans were to write during the summer and record during the winter, but it might not happen so smoothly. In the meantime, Teng might take a stab at works of purely instrumental nature, hinting at possible projects writing scores for musicals or films. "For the moment, I'll do the best that I can."

Click here to check out Vienna Teng's website and the new DVD.

Published: Friday, September 7, 2007