A friend of mine heard her on NPR and strongly urged me to listen to Vienna Teng's second album, Warm Strangers. A glance at the cover, and I quickly judged that I wouldn't like it---a young (Asian, as if you couldn't tell) woman in a flowing dress, her gamine features gazing soulfully toward her distant lover / past / future. Her songs would be indistinguishable from each other and probably not hummable. I couldn't have been more wrong.
Vienna Teng is a triple-threat talent: composer (music and lyrics), pianist, and singer. Her voice, although not powerful, is clear and sweet, and her intonation is perfect. Many of the songs have a clear melodic line, and the accompaniments are rhythmic and complementary--no novice composer she. This is one album that gets better with repeated listenings.
A pianist since the age of 5, Vienna Teng graduated from Stanford and took a job with Cisco Systems as a programmer (gee, hardly any of those around here). One is enormously tempted to fill in the holes in the bio: high-achieving Asian parents force Vienna to take a real job in the computer industry because singing songs in night clubs is where she's likely to end up and that's no life for our daughter and think of the unsavory men she'll run into. Whatever the real story, her obvious talent and interest led ineluctably to a career in recording, and music is all the better for it. [Update 4/11/04: a little web-surfing directed me to this interview which disclosed how she escaped the cubicle.]
