Vienna Teng was one of the first artists that I became aware of mainly through Pandora Radio, when her song Daughter came up on my station, along with a few others. I shared my new discovery with a friend - the same friend who introduced me to the likes of October Project and Sufjan Stevens - and we both fell in love with Vienna Teng’s delicious songwriting, voice, and piano. She was the first of us to make the plunge by buying Warm Strangers, and for the next year or so we took turns buying albums and sharing them with one another. In time, I took it upon myself to buy legitimate copies of each of them for myself.
I think the song that initially drew me to this album is Hope on Fire, which has become one of the iconic songs of my life, representing every person who has ever gotten fed up with the status quo and set out, with nothing but the determination and the knowledge that it’s the right thing to do, to make a change.
When describing Teng to strangers, I usually say that each of her songs tells a story. Sometimes the story is very clearly and straightforwardly told, as in Shasta:
So far so good
You're coming to the bend at the end of the road
You put a hand to the belly that's foreign more
With every day like an oversize load
And so on. Others are more opaque in describing their central characters and events, but it’s clear that some story is there behind the figurative language. A favorite example is My Medea, obviously a mythology reference but otherwise quite mysterious in its words. Is the narrator of the story the mythical Medea herself, her husband Jason, or someone else who played a role in her tragic life? Or is the name Medea just used here to invoke a sense of destructive love and jealousy?
Either way I love this song. The instrumental swelling behind the verse that says “So come to me my love / I’ll tap into your strength and drain it dry / can never have enough / for you I’d burn the length and breadth of sky” is so stirring that I will never tire of it. There are more than a few songs on this album that I could listen to over and over.
This is one of those albums for which I could probably write at least a paragraph about each song, and this review would stretch on for several pages. But I will leave this here, for I have a few more Vienna Teng albums to get to before this is over.
Next: Waking Hour
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