Vienna Teng talks “mixtape mentality,” performing Sunday night at Oklahoma City’s Blue Door
Vienna Teng
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.
Blue Door performer offers “mixtape mentality”
Vienna Teng favors bands and artists who possess a “mixtape mentality.”
The singer/songwriter/pianist’s preference for the eclectic approach is apparent on her fourth album, “Inland Territory.” Released in April, the record’s offerings range from the Depression-era jazz flair of “In Another Life” to the dark shuffle of the immigration tale “No Gringo” to the lively back-porch stomp of “Grandmother Song.”
“I really like albums that cover a lot of ground,” Teng said in an interview from the road in Northern California. “I generally get into those records a lot more than I do an album that has a really consistent feel and mood to it from beginning to end. … I really enjoy hearing artists and bands that just have a mixtape kind of mentality with their albums, and so I guess this was our mixtape album.”
On Sunday night, Teng and friend Alex Wong, who co-produced the album with her, will bring their diverse styles to the Blue Door. Wong not only is a fellow songwriter and singer, he also plays several interesting percussion instruments along with the guitar.
“We have a lot of fun with these duo shows because obviously we worked on the album together, and so it’s fun to take these songs that we’re both pretty intimately familiar with and reforming them for live performance,” she said.
On “Inland Territory,” Teng, 31, mixed chamber pop ballads, deeply personal musical reflections and rock-flavored political anthems. The 12 songs were so divergent she and Wong initially planned to release them as a series of three EPs.
“There are some songs that were recorded in an old house and they were supposed to form one EP, and that kind of was a little more acoustic and focused more on like personal and family stuff. And then there was another group of songs that wanted to be like sort of orchestral pop songs,” she said. “And then … surprisingly for me I was writing more politically aware stuff than I had before, and all of those were taking more of a rock perspective.”
But her label, Zoe/Rounder Records, worried the three-EP idea would be too confusing for fans, so the songs were tossed together in one full-length record.
“We ended up combining them into one album and just trusting the fact that it had been the same team of the two of us making all three of them that it would form this eclectic but coherent work,” she said.
Even amid the album’s diversity, the rollicking “Grandmother Song” grabs the attention with its personal lyrics and kitchen-utensil percussion. The first-generation Chinese-American songsmith based it on grandmother’s objections to her music career.
Teng started out as a premed student at Stanford University before deciding a career as a doctor wasn’t right for her. The California native had been playing piano and writing songs since childhood and began to consider music as a viable vocation. In the meantime, she got a computer programming degree and worked at Cisco Systems before pursuing music full time.
“It’s kind of like the friend that you date that you’re not in love with but, you know, he’s pretty cool and fun to hang out with. And you’re not going to get married to him, but for now it works. That was sort of my relationship with computer science,” she said with a laugh
Though the New Yorker embarked on her music career in 2002 and has since released four albums, performed on “The Late Show with David Letterman” and earned critical acclaim, her family still has misgivings about her calling. “Turning 30 and still trying to sing your songs/come on who do you think you are,” her elder asks in “Grandmother Song.”
“My family is remarkably reticent in general about my music,” she said. “I was pretty nervous about it (the song), but they actually have not said anything negative, which I will take as like they’ve given their blessing for it to go out in the world.”
Teng’s grandmother doesn’t speak much English, but a relative translated the song for her. Teng believes her elder stands by everything attributed to her.
“I went through this long period of rolling my eyes at the whole thing, and saying like ‘well, she doesn’t understand,’” she said. “I think it took me to get into my late 20s and early 30s and really feel secure enough in what I was doing to come around to listen to my parents and my grandparents and realize that there’s a way to honor what their priorities are without doing exactly what they want me to do,” she said.
“I have gotten a lot of great reaction from that song from audience members, actually, and it’s really fascinating to see how people respond to it when we play it live.”
In Concert
Vienna Teng and Alex Wong with Suzanna Choffel
When: 8 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Blue Door, 2805 N McKinley.
Information: 524-0738 or www.bluedoorokc.com.
-BAM
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