All My CDs, pt. 113: Inland Territory

Inland Territory - Vienna Teng

This album came out a year or so after I began counting Vienna Teng as one of my favorites, and I remember it as the moment when her music exploded in every stylistic and thematic direction and became much larger than her previous repertoire of genres and instruments. The core of the album is her signature intellectual, yet emotional, narrative style and arty piano aesthetic, but it pulls in new sounds from spooky atmospheric effects to orchestral accompaniment to folk styles to pots and pans used as percussion.

The expansion of the music is echoed by an expansion of the lyrical themes, with a literal world of topics covered, all to the furtherance of a central agenda: empathy. Now, this is my personal observation and interpretation; I’m not sure how well it syncs with the artist’s intended meaning. But this is my blog.

There are two types of songs on this album, and they are thematically complimentary. The first relates personal conflicts to global ones; the second relates global conflicts to personal ones. There is some overlap in some of the songs, which underscores the connections drawn in others. As I’ve said before, the personal is political.

Exemplifying the first time is Antebellum, whose title means “before the war” and whose words mourn the loss of harmony when a relationship is frought with fighting. The metaphors are taken directly from war imagary, and are echoed in the choice of instruments, while violins and pianos represent a classically romantic sound and a snare drum invokes the war aspect:
I know the borderlines we drew between us
keep the weapons down, keep the wounded safe
I know our antebellum innocense was
never meant to see the light of our armistice day

Other songs, like In Another Life and No Gringo, explicitly put the narrator (and by extension the listeners) in the shoes of people in vastly different circumstances in order to provoke empathy. In Another Life does so very directly by jumping from century to century, exploring the lives and deaths of past humans - not the significant historical figures we’ve all read about, but common folk, the laborers and soldiers and nameless teenage wives who have always made up the bulk of historical existence.

No Gringo makes things even more personal by taking a timeless but contemprory historical problem - immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment - and turns it on its head, asking the central question behind all instances of empathy: “What if it was you?” (Gringo is a Spanish slang term for a white person).

In Radio, the dichotomy between personal and global concerns is especially blurred, since it shuffles back and forth between the perspective of a victim of terror and someone hearing about it on the radio. It’s made clear that when we hear of others’ trajedies, we have a choice. We can empathize, and make their struggles our own... or we can change the station.

Besides being a goldmine of substantive meaning and intellectual stimulation, this album is also simply gorgeous. A few of the songs still send me into involuntary fits of sentimentality and tears, so effectively do they reach into my heart. The favorite of the day is Stray Italian Greyhound, which is all about a pessimist finding reason to feel optimistic. “What do I do when every no turns into maybe?” “This feeling calls for everything that I am not.”

Next: Aims