Description
"I’m kind of a late bloomer," says Vienna Teng. Not that you’d guess from looking at the past few years. The songwriter, singer and pianist has released three critically acclaimed albums, landing her on three Billboard charts and in Amazon.com’s top ten. She regularly sells out theaters across the U.S. and Europe, fans travel hundreds of miles to catch a single show, and her opening sets for the likes of India.Arie, Joan Baez and Madeleine Peyroux end in standing ovations. Mere months after quitting her job as a software engineer in 2002, she was being interviewed on NPR and performing on The Late Show with David Letterman, who declared that he’d listened to her entire debut album and that there was "not a dud" on it. Her brand of sophisticated, piano-driven pop has been gathering accolades ever since: "seductive and transcendent" (Amazon.com), "gorgeously conceived…accomplished yet understated" (Paste), "singular among her peers" (Variety).
So why the sense of a late start? "I’m talking about artistic maturity, not success," Teng explains. "I feel like I’m just now settling into who I am in a lot of ways. Now I really go for the sounds I’m hearing in my head, and tackle the subjects I’ve really wanted to write about, when before I might have shied away and said, ‘I can’t do that kind of thing.’" The newfound confidence shows. Her fourth album, Inland Territory, is a tour de force musically and lyrically, a complex and deeply thoughtful work from an artist cut loose from limitations. Recorded over five months and in four cities, with instrumentation ranging from orchestral percussion to found-object loops to polyphonic choirs, it’s without question her most ambitious work yet.
Sound Clips
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Harbor