Vienna Teng/YMMV

""My first instinct was super, super emo: really really kinda maudlin and depressing, that's where my brain goes first, so.""
 * Crowning Music of Heartwarming Lullaby for a Stormy Night. Also, City Hall. *sniff sniff*
 * Shasta has one of these as well.
 * Anna Rose too.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Stray Italian Greyhound. Bonus points because it's inspired by Real Life.
 * Antebellum.
 * This is what happens when you give Vienna a song title and one hour with which to write.
 * Ear Worm: Despite its serious subject matter, Shasta is incredibly catchy.
 * Germans Love Vienna Teng: She has quite the following in Germany and the Netherlands.
 * Harsher in Hindsight: City Hall, which was inspired by San Francisco's legalisation of gay marriage, has the line "And if they take it away again some day, this beautiful thing won't change". Bittersweet when when first released (in 2006), now after prop 8 it's hauntingly predictive.
 * But as of now, Prop 8 has been deemed unconstitutional. So it's back to being bittersweet.
 * Nightmare Fuel: Pontchartrain is a song about the devastation after Hurricane Katrina. "Darling, Lake Pontchartrain is haunted,/Bones without names, photographs framed in reeds" is fairly typical of the song's lyrics, all set to a fairly disturbing melody.
 * The first line of the a capella song Passage is "I died in a car crash", sung against the background noise of a highway overpass.
 * Radio, about an imagined suicide bombing of San Francisco. If you listen closely to the background noise, you can hear whispers going on behind most of the music, understandable only just after the bridge as Triage codes and real casualty numbers being whispered by a breathless first responder.
 * Hell, all the lyrics. I mean, "backpack of shrapnel and wire"? Not to mention the way it's so calm sounding.
 * One of Us: One of her celebrity crushes is Randall Munroe of Xkcd.
 * She's also said that Enough to Go By is set in a sci-fi world after the apocalypse.
 * Tear Jerker: Could almost be considered part of her signature style, given how many of her songs fall in this category.


 * Troll: Just once, says she put The Atheist Christmas Carol at the end of an album (Warm Strangers) containing some VERY spiritually-tinged songwriting to "keep people uncertain about what [her] beliefs are".
 * True Art Is Angsty: My Medea was written specifically because Vienna felt that to be a great artist, one has to be at least a little bit messed up.