:: Pedantic Platitudes ::

:: Thursday, October 30, 2003 ::

Wow, 38 e-mails today.

Today, I went to see Vienna Teng perform! Vienna Teng is a songwriter and performer. She is a classically-trained pianist who attended Stanford University and once worked for Oracle as a computer programmer before realizing her dream of performing her music. Her songs are expressive, lyrical, and dramatic. They sound wonderful, too.

I was first introduced to Vienna in San Diego this past summer at the Asian American Journalist Association. She performed a very short set as part of the evening's entertainment. I bought Vienna's CD then and got it autographed. I thoroughly enjoyed the album, and I've been listening to it on and off since then.

I found out Vienna was performing here in Harvard Square at Club Passim, so I went to see and hear her perform. Her live performance was extremely entertaining because she tells stories in between her songs. She explains the inspirations for the song she is about to play, and she tells interesting tales of events in her life. She did tell stories when I saw her perform the first time, but this time, I discovered her wonderfully sardonic wit, which she did not really reveal at the AAJA convention. I was laughing so hard at some of her off-beat comments during her stories.

She said she doesn't work off a play list, so the audience members were able to request what they wanted to hear. The room was packed with people. I had no idea she had such a following. Most of the songs were off of her first album, but she did play a couple of new songs that will be on her second album, which is due in February.

The opening act was Kyler England, another singer/songwriter who has a beautiful voice. Kyler plays the guitar, and her songs were pretty good, too. She provided backing vocals for one of Vienna's songs, and Vienna provided background vocals for one of Kyler's songs. Their harmonizing sounded beautiful. I really enjoyed the concert. Vienna's songs

After the concert, I went to a study group for my Chinese class. We were putting together our second presentation for this week. It was both productive and entertaining. The rest of the evening, I worked on my Chinese essay (which I wrote with Chinese characters) and did reading for my evolutionary biology class.

Quote of the Day: "She's a tramp, and she's retarded. That's right... she's fast and slow at the same time!"

:: SL 8:39 PM [+] ::
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