seven venues

Vienna Teng’s performance at the Attucks Theatre April 17 as the finale of the winter/spring Discovery Music Series also represents one of her final performances before she heads off on a new career exploring sustainable business.
Teng begins the MBA program at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in the fall. She plans to earn a dual MBA and masters in natural resources and the environments through the Erb Institute for Sustainable Enterprise.

That only makes her performance all the more compelling and mandatory. Her fourth and latest album, “Inland Territory,” may be her best, a more upbeat, diverse collection of songs than any she’s released.

She took some time recently to discuss where she’s been and where she’s headed.

AD: You took piano lessons growing up before going to Stanford. Was there a time when you knew you enjoyed writing songs and could write them?

Teng.
Teng: I started writing music pretty early not that it was good. I started taking piano lessons when I was five and around age six I realized it would be fun to compose something. In junior high I started writing songs with lyrics.

Was your family musical?

In a way. It wouldn’t seem like it from the outside. Both my parents worked in high tech and my family was academically oriented.

My dad picked up three chords on guitar from a college roommate and wrote songs to my mother. I think my first role model for songwriting was my dad. He would write these lullabies for us and would play them on guitar and sing. That’s where I got the idea. And my mom always loved singing.”

Do you remember any of your early efforts?

They’re definitely some. I probably still shouldn’t be showing them to other people. The first song I wrote with lyrics was called “Curiosity.” I think I was 11 or 12 and I decided there were way too many love songs in the world. So I was going to write about big serious ideas. “Curiosity” was about how intellectual curiosity is the foundation of civilization. I had all these examples, scientific discoveries and philosophers. So it was this little pop song about how the mind is the bedrock of civilization.

Was there a tug of war between music and tech?

Yes. When I went to Stanford, I came in a pre-med thinking I would go into medicine. Then, like the majority of pre-meds, I realized there as a lot more to it that I wasn’t prepared for. I fell into computer science. I was in the middle of Silicon Valley so it was really easy for me to take a programming class. There were so many interesting assignments you could do So many internships and jobs. It was pretty interesting stuff for me. It was cool to get under the hood. But honestly my heart was never fully in it.

That was the time dawned on m what I wanted to do was music and it was a scary realization. It was off the beaten path of what I knew. But it started to become clear that was what I needed to do

Was there one moment, an epiphany, or was it gradual?

I can trace it back to a time when my piano teacher, of all people, sat me down and he said he wanted to know what I wanted to do with my life, what my dreams were. The first thing out of my mouth was I wanted to be a composer and songwriter. I quickly qualified that with, but that’s not going to happen. He asked the simple question, well, why not? So I started to say it’s not practical, my parents expect me to do this, do that. He had put this seed in my mind, if this is what you really want, why don’t you do it?

I think that’s what set me on the road to making it happen. Then what are steps you’re going to take. Standing from where you are, what is first thing to make that dream possible? It was really a life changing evening, a life-changing moment.

It was strange how it came about. I hadn’t practiced at all for that lesson. I was in trouble. He said it’s clear we’re not going to make any progress. Let’s talk about something else. You’re in high school now and you’re a busy girl. Let’s talk about what all this is for. It was an extraordinary conversation.

What makes a good song for you?

A good song for me is in some way a pop song at its core. It doesn’t have to be a catchy chorus. It could be something one of instruments does. It could be a little moment that catches your attention and comes back again. I wish I could be more specific. There are also really great songs that don’t fit that form that are more story telling songs. I really love songs that pull you into a world for a couple of minutes then let you go back to you own world feeling differently about it. That’s why I have a soft spot for country music. In some ways, they’re kind of the master storytellers.

What songwriters do you admire?

I’ve kind of had the same main people in many ways. Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel through my dad as a little kid. I was singing lines like “the come on from the whores on Seventh Avenue” when I was seven years old having no idea what it meant. He made me realize songwriting was a craft. To this day, I pick up “Rhythm of the Saints” or “Graceland” or “Hearts and Bones” and realize I still have a lot to figure out about how it’s done.

These ways he has dancing around what he mans, not fully explaining it, but somehow hitting you in gut with it. It’s really amazing and inspiring to me. That’s the standard I’m chasing.”

You spent two years at Cisco as a programmer before going into music full-time. What did you do there?

I worked on user interfaces for routing equipment. That’s the easiest way to explain it. Lots of switches and routers. Usually people would do command line interface to maintain or configure but we were building a visual interface. That’s what I spent my time doing. There were moments when it felt really rewarding, but there was also, What am I doing with my life?

How did you make the transition to full-time musician?

I actually graduated from college with the plan to  give myself two years and at end of two years I would somehow have a way to jumping into music full time.

The computer was like a waitressing job. I was saving up money and biding my time. I decided I was either going to music school or would just quit and make a go of it as a working musician. I lucked out around the two year mark when I got both an acceptance into the Berklee College of Music and I got an offer from an independent label, Virt Records

How did that come about?

This one came out of nowhere. I think a web site had reviewed my first record that I’d put out on my own and I got an email from this guy saying I read this review and listened to clips online. I run a small record label could you send me CD?

So I did pretty much exactly the wrong thing. I did send him a CD, but I did pretty much nothing else. I didn’t follow up. I did everything wrong. For whatever reason, he found it compelling enough and said I would like to see you live. I’d performed at open mics and the occasional coffee house gig. I think I had played one show at an Indian restaurant. I did have this show at a restaurant that was going to be a nice thing with a meal and a show by me. That was the one I invited him to. I begged and pleaded all my friends to buy dinner and concert tickets and come and fill up the room. Fortunately, that went pretty well.

Tell me about the making of “Inland Territory.” Before recording it, you’d moved from California to New York. Was that an influence?

The new album.
I feel like it really did. I think “Inland Territory” was the album I couldn’t write without having lived in New York. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to work with Alex Wong, the producer. We’d been friends for a long time, but never lived in the same place. We had started touring together leading up the making of the album and had really gotten to understand and be excited about each other’s musical leanings and the way we thought about songwriting and production. I think also writing the songs I had to live in a very crowded kind of frantic paced-place in order to write a lot of the songs  I remember in general everything started so speeded up. A lot of the songs had a faster tempo and it seems like the words came more rapid fire. “Grandmother song,” “Stray Italian Greyhound,” that have a lot of words in a very small space. That says how compressed life is in New York.

Was there an overriding theme you went into the studio with to do the album?

I write so slowly that in a way it’s a beggar can’t be chooser. I write 12 or 13 songs and that’s the album that we have. I hope they’re all strong enough. I was writing three different sorts of songs. We talked about releasing it as three EPs. There was one group that seemed to be about family history or about history in general. There was another group that wanted to be lushly orchestrated with strings and woodwinds. Those were more about relationships or about ways they’re parallel to romantic relationships in other types of areas. The third group was most interesting to me was. They were kind of political songs. That was surprising to me because I usually shy away from doing things like that. I ended up writing a song about illegal immigration, another one about climate change. Those were the hardest ones to write. I really didn’t want to write a song that was beating people over he head with something or seeming like I knew something about the issue that I don’t. My way out of it was they all ended up being storytelling songs. I felt that just happened to be where my head was at the time.

This was the first album you helped produce, right?

This was the one where I really did get more involved in imagining what the songs sounded like and hiring the musicians. It was a really exciting process. It also made he realize I have no idea what I’m doing. It was great to working with Alex because he has really strong ideas what a track should be.

Tell me about a few songs from the album:

Stray Italian greyhound

It was partly inspired by going to an Obama rally in 2008. It was surprising to me how much I got caught up in it because there’s part of me very cynical about politics. I didn’t want to fall under the spell of this guy everybody was excited about. I did find myself realizing in order for something to happen you personally you have to step up. That was a scary thought. It’s kind of like when you fall in love you realize, well, I have to make myself vulnerable here and actually give something.

Antebellum

That was the first song I wrote with someone that I’m really happy with. It began with piano part I’d been playing some Debussy and Chopin pieces to practice and had gotten really into that and I think that’s where piano bit came from. I got that far and got stuck. Eventually, Alex and I started working on it together. It was a very much back and forth democratic songwriting process, which is really rare for me. It’s very rare I write songs like that. We finished the music and tried to figure out what it was about lyrically. I said since my hands were moving apart on the piano part. It felt like it should be about two people growing apart in different directions. There was a lot of my relationship with my father in there. So it ends up being a remarkably personal song for being written by two people. It’s one of those I’m most proud of.

Augustine.

That one really took my by surprise. It was a song I’d started in 2005 and finished and decided was bad. So I just kind of tabled it. It was sitting in dust as something tried and rejected. But it kept coming back. Sometimes songs have wills of their own. Augustine kept surfacing and saying no, no, no, you just haven’t gotten it yet. I went back and cut most of the verses and rewrote the chorus and it was still not great. I finally finished it and I thought this is an interesting song. I don’t know how to feel about it. It was so fond  of itself. It just said, no, no, no this is great, I think you should put me on the album. It fought for itself all the way there. I still don’t know what to think of it, but it was definitely sure of itself.

You are going back to grad school to get an MBA.

I am. It was the news I sent out this week.

Why?

A very good question. I haven’t formulated a short answer to that yet. Basically I’ve always been interested in a lot of different things apart from music and creative expression. One of most important things for me is to work on something I feel like is contributing something tangibly good for the world, at least joining that effort in some way I’ve tried to do that in music.

A lot of people have made argument that art plays an important role. But in the past few years felt myself drawn to doing something a  lot more boring, I guess. I get excited reading about solar technology or carbon credit markets or energy efficient models. That’s the thing that gets me excited right now. I actually had a moment where I realized I  spent all evening reading articles about this stuff when I could have picked up an instrument and been working on a song. It just revealed to me that’s where my heart is right now and this is what I want to be doing.

Although it’s difficult to leave this life of music I have. It’s pretty much the best gig you can hope for. I make a living doing it and I’m surrounded by inspiring amazing people. How can you leave that behind? But it does feel like the right thing to do.

Is there a plan to combine music and green business?

I’m going to school full time. I’m entertaining the idea that some day I’ll be able to balance the two. In the meantime, I know I’ll play music because writing music is the ultimate procrastination. I wrote my first album when I didn’t want to be doing my homework. I’m sure there will be plenty of that happening.

Vienna Teng. Saturday performs April 17, 7:30 p.m., @ The Attucks Theatre: 1010 Church Street; Norfolk 23510 www.discoverymusicseries.com; Tickets are $20.