September 22, 2003
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One day, you're a software engineer at Cisco. The next day, you quit your job to become a professional musician. Six months later, you're on The Late Show with David Letterman. This is the story of Vienna Teng. The Chinese-American singer/songwriter/pianist is taking the world by storm with the release of her album, Waking Hour. AsiaXpress' Joe Nguyen sits down and talks with this rising star.

NGUYEN: In your own words, briefly describe who Vienna Teng is.
TENG: (laughs) Uh…well Vienna Teng is a singer, songwriter and pianist. She writes music that sort of borders somewhere between folk and pop music and some classical.

Well, that answers my second question, so where did grow up?
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How did you first get into music?
Well my parents signed me up for piano lessons as a kid and I really liked it. I ended up spending as much of my time writing my own music as I did practicing.

Click on picture to enlarge

From the biography from your website, it says:
“After a two-year stint on the pre-med track, she switched her major to Computer Science. By all appearances, her existence is that of the quintessential brainy Asian-American girl… By the time San Francisco-based singer/songwriter/pianist Vienna Teng, 24, quit her full-time software engineering job at Cisco last August, she had signed with an independent record label and was preparing for the release of her debut, Waking Hour.”
How did you come to realize that you wanted to be a musician?
In college I think I was trying a lot of different things, but none of them really seemed to be my calling. I didn’t feel like I was particular good at either medicine or engineering, even though both of them were really interesting to me. At the same time I felt like music was something I felt like I had a relatively unique ability in and people really seem to get some value out of it. That’s probably when I decided to make a go for it.

Who/What are your creative influences?
A lot of folk singers from the 70s. Not so much folk singers as they were pop artists. James Taylor, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. Also a lot of the classical musicians. In college, I listened to a lot of the female artists like Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan.

What challenges have you faced being an Asian-American musician?
I really haven’t faced any challenges. It’s actually been helping me as many people are surprised to see an Asian-American doing this genre [folk-pop] of music. They’ve actually been very supportive. continue >>