Vienna teng never look away lyrics how to#

Even though her default mode in the early years seemed to be “quiet melancholy”, she’d work in little bits of humor at her own expense, or find clever ways to make one song’s story interconnect with another. The songs weren’t so much being written, as they were in a process of telling Vienna what they wanted to be, with that process sometimes continuing past the album release as arrangements of songs morphed in a live setting during the years that followed.

Even in the early days when her musical arrangements were largely centered around a quiet, piano-based “chamber pop” style, each song seemed to be an exercise in taking a markedly different perspective or premise, something in an entirely different lane from your average songwriter’s thought process, and following that narrative and seeing where it took her. She comes up with a great idea for a song, she lets that song be in its own little universe, and she never seems to make it into a template for future songs to follow. But Vienna is the one I admire for consistently thinking outside the box.

Vienna teng never look away lyrics how to#

I’ve admired many other songwriters throughout the years for having a knack for catchy hooks, or ridiculous proficiency on their instruments, or being mad geniuses when it comes to mashing different genres together, or even knowing how to wield a bit of good-old heart-tugging sentimentality. So maybe the best way to be inspired by her is to not try to mimic her at all. Vienna is such a restlessly creative individual who constantly challenges her own status quo. I knew pretty early on that I had stumbled across something special when I first heard her music – all it took was two songs performed on solo piano at an intimate live show way back in the spring of 2003 for me to first feel that tug deep within me, telling me I wanted to write something that communicated such powerful imagery wrapped in curious metaphor, and yet she was so intimidatingly good at it that I was pretty sure I’d never be able to come anywhere near it.

And while there quite a lot of songwriters I’ve admired enough to consider them influential over the years, she seems to be the one I come back to the most consistently and remain in awe of, somehow still finding interesting little nuances I hadn’t considered before in songs of hers that I’ve loved for nearly two decades now. I’m sure I’ve echoed this sentiment many times in all of the reviews I’ve written of Vienna’s music over the years. If I could write songs like anyone in the world, I’d want to write like Vienna Teng does.