[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_vienna_teng.png]]

->''Blue, blue caravan,''
->''Winding down to the valley of lights,''
->''My true love is a man''
->''Who would hold me for ten thousand nights.''
->''In the wild, wild wailing of wind,''
->''He's a house 'neath a soft, yellow moon.''
->''So, blue, blue caravan,''
->''Won't you carry me down to him soon?''
->--'''Vienna Teng''', "Blue Caravan"

Vienna Teng (born Cynthia Yih Shih, October 3, 1978) is a UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco Bay Area singer/songwriter who works in a style she likes to call chamber-folk. A classically trained pianist, she left a job at Cisco Systems to write and record music full-time. She has taken to touring in the past few years, often accompanied by professional percussionist Alex Wong, who co-produced ''Inland Territory'' with her.

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Discography:
* 2002 - ''Waking Hour''
* 2004 - ''Warm Strangers''
* 2006 - ''Dreaming Through the Noise''
* 2009 - ''Inland Territory''
* 2010 - ''The Moment Always Vanishing'' (live album)
* 2013 - ''Aims''
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!!She and her work provide examples of:
* AfterTheEnd: ''Enough to Go By'', according to WordOfGod.
* AllDrummersAreAnimals: When introducing ''Antebellum'' on the live album, Vienna mentions Alex drooling over the arrangement, which Alex notes is a very clichéd thing for a drummer to do.
* AlternateUniverse: ''No Gringo'', [[spoiler: where-in [[PersecutionFlip Americans are trying to get across the border into Mexico]] because America's economy collapsed.]] [[HarsherInHindsight Oh, wait]].
* AlbumTitleDrop: "Recessional" provides the title to Dreaming Through the Noise:
-->''And she dreams through the noise, her weight against me''
** The live album ''The Moment Always Vanishing'' gets its title from ''Antebellum'', which originally appeared in ''Inland Territory'':
-->''In the fall we circle through the leaves\\
And talk about the little ones\\
And we smile, but never say too much\\
The moment always vanishing''
* AmazingFreakingGrace: The penultimate line of ''Recessional'' is "oh words like rain, how sweet the sound," sung almost exactly to the familiar tune.
* AnachronicOrder: ''Recessional'' is backwards.
* AsianAndNerdy: Alludes to model minority stereotypes in ''Grandmother Song'' ("All the good boys, baby, they're in grad school.") Teng herself attended Stanford as an undergrad and worked for Cisco as a software engineer before seriously pursuing music.
** Since going back to grad school and being inspired by an album full of songs about things like climate change and fluctuating urban populations, she's straight-up admitted to being "dorky" when explaining her song inspirations in concert.
* AudienceParticipationSong:
** ''Enough to Go By'' was supposed to be one, before Vienna realized that audiences do not have eidetic memories. ''Soon Love Soon'' is a more successful attempt, where the audience is given the repeated title chant and chorus to sing.
** Grandmother Song is her most recent example--Vienna lets the audience clap the beat for her, and invites them to also hoot, holler, and make other raucous interjections.
** ''The Breaking Light'' has become a subtler example of this, with the audience joining in on the background vocal part at the climax of the song.
* BawdySong: Subverted in ''1BR/1BA'', in that the narrator is none too happy singing about their neighbours' bawdiness.
* BewareTheNiceOnes: ''Whatever You Want'' is built entirely around this trope, telling the story of a CorruptCorporateExecutive's obedient, unappreciated secretary and wife who ultimately join forces to turn him in.
--> ''I am the last one you'd ever suspect''
--> ''of setting the fire, of setting the fire''
--> ''But as you switch on your TV tomorrow morning,''
--> ''you'll hear me saying quietly:''
--> ''[[IronicEcho "Whatever you want, whatever you want, whatever you want is fine by me..."]]''
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: ''Watershed'' paints Nature as an omnipotent being who doesn't seem to care what the insignificant humans do with her world.
* BreatherEpisode: [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] — ''Passage'', one of Vienna's eeriest and [[TearJerker saddest]] songs, is placed between the heartwarming lullaby ''Anna Rose'' and the soft, pleasant ''Atheist Christmas Carol'' (which, despite what its title might suggest, is not an AuthorTract).
* CallBack: in ''Landsailor'', "But there’s a storm outside your door / And I’m a child no more" might remind people of ''Lullaby for a Stormy Night''.
* CeilingBanger / RightThroughTheWall: 1BR/1BA.
--> ''My upstairs neighbors are making sounds that I never want to hear''\\
''I hope they're just moving furniture around and really liking their ideas.''
** Hilariously, one of the string players does an instrumental impression of TheImmodestOrgasm right between those two lines.
* CorruptCorporateExecutive: The man described in ''Whatever You Want'' is implied to be one of these.
* DeadpanSnarker: Alex has his moments on the live album.
* DeadSparks: ''Between'' and ''Antebellum'' could definitely interpreted as this.
* DoubleMeaningTitle: Vienna actually built an entire song (''I Don't Feel So Well'') out of the well / good grammatical nitpick.
* [[EducationMama Education Grandmama]]: The titular narrator of ''Grandmother Song'', as every 2nd-gen Asian immigrant kid can relate, although the song goes into detail exploring her very real reasons for putting such importance on a proper education for her children and grandchildren.
* EmotionlessGirl: The narrator of above-mentioned ''I Don't Feel So Well''.
* FadingIntoTheNextSong: ''Shasta'' into ''Homecoming'' on ''Warm Strangers''.
* GaiasVengeance: [[AvertedTrope Averted]] in ''Watershed''. It's not that Nature hates humanity — it's just that she doesn't care.
* GoodGirlsAvoidAbortion: Played with ambiguously in ''Shasta'', which focuses on the narrator's personal struggle with the choice amidat pressure and the threat of ostracization from those around her, rather than on her ultimate decision.
* GreenAesop: "Landsailor", "Copenhagen", and "Never Look Away". And that's just from ''Aims''.
* IntercourseWithYou: ''Momentum''. Vienna noted this at a concert once after sharing with the audience that a publication reviewing her first album had described it as "Music to get you into a woman's pants."
* IsntItIronic: Narrowly [[AvertedTrope Averted]] when Vienna convinced a friend not to use ''Between'' as the first dance at a wedding.
* LyricalDissonance: ''Shasta''. It sounds like such a cheerful, upbeat, fun song, until you realize it's about an abortion.
** Also see ''Between''. Beautiful waltz that a friend of Vienna's was planning to use at her wedding until Vienna pointed out the song's meaning.
** ''Hymn of Acxiom'' - Vienna introduces this song by mentioning that a lot of high school color guards love using this song, making her wonder if anyone has actually listened to the lyrics.
* MoodWhiplash: The last three songs of ''Warm Strangers'' go from heartwarming, to eerie and depressing, and back to heartwarming.
* MoralityBallad: ''Whatever You Want'', a song about [[CorruptCorporateExecutive an Enron-esque CEO]].
* [[MotherNature Mother Earth]]: Narrates "Never Look Away". [[spoiler:[[DownerEnding And apparently ''dies'' at the end of it.]]]]
* MotorMouth: The verses of ''In the 99'' fly by so quickly, and are buried under so much instrumentation that they're difficult to make out without a lyric sheet.
* MyBelovedSmother: Present ([[ShrugOfGod maybe]]) in ''My Medea.''
* NewSoundAlbum: from "chamber-folk" and "girl-with-piano" on her first two albums, ''Dreaming Through The Noise'' incorporated strong jazz influences. ''Inland Territory'' kept a few of them and mixed in some electronica as well. ''Aims'' is essentially a complete re-invention, with a much more studio sound and heavy pop influence.
* NonAppearingTitle: About half of her songs.
* OneWomanWail: The end of ''Recessional''.
* PepTalkSong: "Level Up". The music video just makes it even better.
* PersecutionFlip: ''No Gringo'', which follows an AlternateUniverse American family trying to cross the border into Mexico to find work.
* PosthumousNarration: ''Passage'', sung from the perspective of a car crash victim watching as life slowly goes on after their death.
* RadioSong: "Radio" depicts the aftermath of a suicide bombing in a major American city through the perspective of a first responder. The speaker alludes to a time when such events were only a distant reality reported on the radio, at which she could easily "turn away to another station" to hear a love song.
* ReincarnationRomance: ''In Another Life''.
* RuleOfThree: ''Between'' is described as having been written in a very clever stage of her life, being a waltz in three verses with three vocal parts, the melody coming between the two harmony lines.
* SelfBackingVocalist:
** Done via live looping during the ''Inland Territory'' era, most notably ''The Last Snowfall'', which layers her backing vocals into a choir to form the song's signature hook.
** Used to extremely creepy effect in ''The Hymn of Acxiom'', an ''a cappella'' hymn that splits Vienna's voice into an entire computerized choir to sing from the perspective of a marketing database. She introduces it as her "Vienna Girls' Choir."
** Also taken to extremes on ''Copenhagen (Let Me Go)''. By the end of the song, she's singing three different vocal parts in a round.
* SelfDeprecation: Generally not evident in her songs, but in live shows, when talking about how she came up with the ideas for songs, she will quite frequently poke fun at herself for writing about dorky or pretentious subjects, or playfully suggest that she "ripped off" an artist she had been listening to at the time. This can cause a bit of MoodWhiplash if the song being introduced is a sad or serious one.
* ShownTheirWork: ''Radio''. Aside from [[ItsForABook amassing what must be a very questionable search history]] looking up suicide bombings, Vienna includes real casualty totals from Israel and Palestine as whispered numbers along with the aforementioned triage codes.
* SleepCute: ''Recessional'':
--> "In the terminal she sleeps on my shoulder, hair falling forward, mouth all askew..."
** And again in ''Flyweight Love'':
--> "We fell asleep in our three-day clothes, one tilted head on the other..."
* SorryImGay: The back story of [[spoiler:''Unwritten Letter #1'']].
* SpiritualSuccessor: ''Watershed'' explores ''Pontchartrain'''s theme from a much more inhuman perspective.
* SpokenWordInMusic: The intro to ''Flyweight Love'' fades in over recordings, solicited from fans, of people talking about their experiences with long-distance relationships.
* StageNames: "Vienna" after the city's illustrious musical history, and "Teng" to reflect her Chinese heritage.
* StalkerWithACrush: On the live album, Vienna personifies ''The Tower'' as a finicky woman who will only agree to be part of the setlist when Alex is part of the gig, because "''The Tower'' has a crush on Alex".
--> '''Alex''': "I don't know, she sounds kinda creepy to me. I've dated girls like ''The Tower'' before."
* StepfordSmiler: "Whatever You Want".
* SurvivalMantra: Two in ''Radio'': ''It's just the radio, darling, just the radio'' and ''We are not some Third World country... This is not some Third World country...''
* TarotMotifs: ''The Tower''
* TheSomethingSong: ''Grandmother Song''.
* TogetherInDeath: Heavily implied by "The Breaking Light":
** The third verse shows the narrator coming to terms with her brother's death, as she changes from saying "you will return" (to me) to "we will return" (to the afterlife). She describes her hope to see him again in life as a "hollow dream" that's fading.
** The second chorus begins by repeating the first, with its promise that the brother's memories will "bring you back to me", but then it adds another section, including the line "listen to the murmurs, carry them inside you, 'til we're on the other side". They will reunite, but not on this earth.
* UncommonTime: ''Harbor'', which she wrote for her boyfriend, a drummer who loves uneven time signatures, alternates between 5/8 in the verse, a mix of 6/8 and shorter measures in the chorus, and brief instrumental sections in 7/8.
** Also notable in her devilishly difficult [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSK3DRVEqBE ''Signal Fire'']], Vienna's attempt at a ProgRock song, written in 5/8 with brief sections in 6/8 and the occasional measure of 7/8 thrown in at key moments.
** ''The Last Snowfall'''s precise time signature is difficult to pin down due to its slow, meandering melody and very minimal instrumentation. It's actually written over a fairly quick 5/8 (which can be made out most easily by listening to Vienna's beatboxing in live performances).
** ''St. Stephen's Cross'' has very lumpy time signatures, featuring 9-beat melodic phrases complicated by drums that plod along at their own steady 4 beats a measure and a dropped beat or two in key spots, and a relatively subtle shift to 6/8 in the instrumental sections.
** ''Level Up'' applies this to upbeat, electronic dance music with a steady time signature of 7/4.
** ''Close to Home'' toys with this as well, switching between 6/8, 7/8, and 8/8 on a measure-to-measure basis almost throughout.
* {{Yandere}}: 'My Medea' is told from the perspective of one.
* YuriGenre: ''City Hall'', especially as acted by Marika Hughes and Dina Maccabee.
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