Power Center, Ann Arbor, 10/7/2011

[Fred]

Green Island Serenade
Augustine
Gravity
Shasta
Homecoming
Recessional
Stray Italian Greyhound
Whatever You Want
Seedling #3
1BR/1BA
Harbor
Blue Caravan
Antebellum
Grandmother Song
---------------------
Vincent
Soon Love Soon

[aaparallel]

Did she play Seedling #3 just for you?

You're very sneaky. I would have loved to attend this show. What a great birthday for you!

[tanthalas]

Was a great show tonight - lots of new folks in the crowd mixed in with some diehard fans from the Ark. I wanna say a majority of the people there were seeing Vienna for the first time, so she definitely made a ton of new fans tonight.

Fred - great to finally get to meet you after all this time!

Here's further detail about the set from the notes I took which then got lost (mental note: Evernote sucks for offline note taking) --

solo portion of the set --
Green Island Serenade (a capella)
Augustine
Gravity (Vienna talks about Braid and asks the audience how many people had heard of the game, and there were only like 3 claps in the audience; nerd shortage!)
Shasta ("Juno in 3 minutes, before the movie existed"; also, Vienna played the first few notes of this song and some of the audience started cheering, and Vienna said, "this fulfills one of my two childhood dreams - the first one was to speak on the radio, 'this is 107.1 FM' , and the second was to play just a little bit of a song and have it recognized by the audience")
Homecoming
Recessional
Stray Italian Greyhound
Whatever You Want -- Vienna used the looper here to provide the percussion and background vocals
Seedling #3 (Vienna asked the audience to add "in bed" to the end of each verse)

at this point, she invited some musical guests onstage to accompany her - two people on violin/viola, one on cello, one on base
1BR/1BA
-- and then a drummer!
Harbor
Blue Caravan
Antebellum
Grandmother Song

---------------------
Vincent - this was a Steve Jobs dedication
Soon Love Soon - this song was done with a two-part choir tonight; one was the audience singing the main melody, while she had a special group of folks go up on stage as a choir to sing the more complicated harmony parts of the song


The opener tonight, Katie Lee, sounded pretty awesome too. You can check out her music at http://katieleemusic.com/ (she intro'd herself as, "I'm not Vienna Teng. I am also Asian though, so I know it gets confusing.")

[Fred]

@Tanthalas Really nice to meet you too! Not much to add to your thorough review. For me the immensely looped Whatever You Want and the choral Soon Love Soon were highlights. More impressions later.

[Michele]

Yay, happy to see people made the pilgrimage! Hope you guys get some time to enjoy Ann Arbor!

Thanks for posting notes, Calvin. (It doesn't matter what app or pen+paper you use, they're gonna get lost!) Fred, it was your first "solo" show, right?

(Vienna talks about Braid and asks the audience how many people had heard of the game, and there were only like 3 claps in the audience; nerd shortage!)

The opener tonight, Katie Lee, sounded pretty awesome too. You can check out her music at http://katieleemusic.com/ (she intro'd herself as, "I'm not Vienna Teng. I am also Asian though, so I know it gets confusing.")

Heh. It's different out there

[Fred]

Did she play Seedling #3 just for you?

You're very sneaky. I would have loved to attend this show. What a great birthday for you!

Nope. I told Vienna I was coming, back when I bought my tickets, but I didn't make any requests and my trip never came up again, nor did I see her before the show (or afterward, for that matter). I certainly enjoyed hearing it, though, as did the audience. A short, funny song like this is really a good addition to her lineup.

The only request/dedication Vienna mentioned was Vincent, dedicated to Steve Jobs, she said on a "dare" from Tanthalas. Don't really know what she meant by that.

The sneakiness was a bit deliberate. I thought it would be fun to report in to y'all from out of the blue.

[Fred]

Yay, happy to see people made the pilgrimage! Hope you guys get some time to enjoy Ann Arbor!

Thanks for posting notes, Calvin. (It doesn't matter what app or pen+paper you use, they're gonna get lost!) Fred, it was your first "solo" show, right?

(Vienna talks about Braid and asks the audience how many people had heard of the game, and there were only like 3 claps in the audience; nerd shortage!)

The opener tonight, Katie Lee, sounded pretty awesome too. You can check out her music at http://katieleemusic.com/ (she intro'd herself as, "I'm not Vienna Teng. I am also Asian though, so I know it gets confusing.")

Heh. It's different out there

Yeah, my daughter who's applying to college this year did a campus visit to U-M (which is how I sold this extravaganza to my wife, ). The U had been climbing up her list for a while (lots of NYers go there) and after this visit it hit #1.

Power Center was so large and my seat so remote that if Katie hadn't said she was Asian I'd never have known. I agree with Tanthalas; she's good. Indie/folkish with a bit of country twang (lots of pedal steel on her EP). Got a chance to talk with her after & get a CD signed; told her I'd make sure to see her if she tours to NY someday.

(More on Power Center later.)

[tanthalas]

Yeah the trip was fairly last minute for me as well, so I got tickets to the show like last week. I sat on the first row of the balcony (yeah, wayyyy up there), with all the other slackers.

re:dare - V was putting the set list together for the show and asked me for ideas, so I mentioned that I thought earlier that Vincent would be sort of apropos, if she could pull it off (i.e. remember the lyrics). And she did spectacularly, of course.

side note: when the show started I was glad that it was Vincent and not some cover with a ton of high notes!

[aaparallel]

side note: when the show started I was glad that it was Vincent and not some cover with a ton of high notes!

Here's video of that performance of Vincent, recorded by iSPY Magazine. I noticed that she's playing it a 3rd lower than in the video from Lake Oswego. Awesome transposition skills come in handy when you're sick. I'm sure she would have found her way around a cover with more high notes.

[Fred]

@Michele No, not my first solo show. That was at Infinity Music Hall this past January. That one was really solo, Just Vienna, piano, looper (and she was pretty sparing with the looper).

Haven't been at a real keyboard since the show (now: iPad in car), and I'll save my random comments on the show till then. Not a huge fan of entering much text this way.

[Fred]

Yeah the trip was fairly last minute for me as well, so I got tickets to the show like last week. I sat on the first row of the balcony (yeah, wayyyy up there), with all the other slackers.

I bought mine a few weeks ago and even then the best remaining seats were balcony. I went for 2nd row dead center. (There were unoccupied rear orch seats, but front balcony was better.) What gave me negative joy was that the 3 best seats in the house--front row orch at Vienna's feet--were unoccupied. No-shows, presumably. Altho sightlines and sound were impeccable, the distance was very great and I couldn't really see Vienna's facial expressions as she played. Opera glasses (or a little pair of 6x roof prism binocs I own) would have been right.

[Fred]

Ha! finally got my hands on my laptop so I can add my own notes. (We've been on the road since Thursday, visiting college campuses with my daughter. She's been using the laptop to write a chem lab report. First things first.)

First off, Vienna really showed what an accomplished performer she was in this one, having to contend with a "plague afflicting the Ross School" (evidently an upper respiratory infection going around) that left her more vocally challenged than I've ever heard her before. As aaparallel pointed out elsewhere, she transposed whole songs down. She also altered some vocal lines so that they descended when we are used to hearing them ascend. She started out smoothly enough (maybe she moved the a capella Green Island Serenade to leadoff to take advantage of early strength, altho I've heard her lead with it before, e.g., TEDxBoulder). As the evening went on she occasionally sounded like it was getting to her, but then she would come back. I didn't think she would do the high-register "and we can be as one god" in the last chorus of Soon Love Soon, the last encore number, but she did, and it was fine. Having a little grit in her normally silky voice actually worked to her advantage in Grandmother Song.

Some notes on individual songs. I won't duplicate tanthalas here, just add any additional observations I made.

The leadoff a capella Green Island Serenade was sung while Vienna sat sideways on the piano bench facing the audience. What showmanship that was! Immediate audience rapport. I've seen her do it standing on the very front of the stage without a microphone as an encore (memorably, at Westhhampton Beach). Very dramatic, but what she did last night was much more effective for leading off.

Augustine was played without introduction, and ferociously, as if Vienna willed her hands to overcome her vocal issue. (It wasn't the only song played without intro. Understandably, there was a bit less banter last night than average--far less than at the loose-as-a-goose show at The Bell House in March where I last saw her.)

The Braid Gravity had a more elaborate looped vocal outro than I remember hearing before. Vienna's really got that machine doing her bidding.

Vienna made the point that Shasta did not represent her own point of view.

She also made the point that Homecoming was male POV.

She said Stray Italian Greyhound was the product of a conscious decision to write a happy song.

The loop "percussion" in Whatever You Want was beyond awesome.

I think she left the "numbers" interlude out of Seedling #3. I could be wrong, not sure. The audience absolutely ate it up.

Violin and cello were used to act out the couple upstairs in 1BR/1BA. Pretty funny!

Blue Caravan with strings and drums was a major highlight.

I think we've done the Antebellum sing-along before. Maybe at Infinity Music Hall, my previous solo show?

Violin and bass solos (brief) in Grandmother Song. Seed of a good idea. The violinist was game but maybe more at home in classics. Adding a serious down-home fiddle solo to this song would be something. I've heard it so many times live I can't remember if there was a fiddler on the CD. In my head I'm hearing what Carrie Rodriguez could do with it. As I mentioned Vienna's very slightly gritty vocal actually was a good thing here.

Vienna said the Soon Love Soon chorus was how she had originally envisioned the song. (With the chorus doing the rather enigmatic "and we will, and we will never" part -- is that how it goes?) As far as the "big chorus" (the audience part) went, I still think we did better in 3-part harmony at Highline in 2010.

After the show the merch table was mobbed! Sales must have been enormous. It took Vienna a while to come out (I wasn't sure she would, either because she didn't feel well or to save her voice) and the Power Center people had pretty much emptied the lobby. I left when they told me to, and there were few behind. To my chagrin, thus did I miss congratulating Vienna on her triumph.

I did however get a chance to tell Katie Lee I thought she did great too. It would be nice to have her succeed and see her again someday. The notice Katie got to do the opening gig kept decreasing with every retelling of the story by her and by Vienna during the show. I think it started at 36 hours, and ended somewhere about 8. If the show had gone on much longer one of them would have said Vienna found Katie in the lobby before the show and dragged her onstage. I imagine openers are used to short notice. Anyway, her contribution to the evening was much appreciated.

The following day my wife and daughter and I toured the U-M campus and went to an info session. My daughter has had the U on her potential application list for a while, and she says it went to the top of the list after this weekend. I'll have to agree that it was pretty danged awesome. (I thought that while I was an undergrad at rival MSU, too.) So the ostensible and actual reasons for this trip both ended up justifying themselves. Quite the weekend. One more school to see tomorrow, and then back to the real world.

[Fred]

Closing thoughts/thing I remembered later:

The more I replay the show in my head the more I think there was an extra dose of passion in the piano playing, and not just in Augustine. Adrenaline? Whatever, it sounded great.

The student who conducted the campus tour the next day called the Ross School students the "rock stars of the university." Without irony. No pun intended, I'm sure.

The Power Center was sufficiently interesting as a venue to get its own writeup, which I'll do in the Venues sections if/when I get a chance.

[Fred]

Addendum:

We ate Chinese food for lunch after our campus visit before departing Ann Arbor. There were 2 fortunes in the cookies that I though were a propos of Seedling #3. Just found them in my wallet which reminded me. If Vienna ever needs alternate verses...

"Stick to the basics; be weary [sic; meant 'wary'] of novelties."

"Soon a visitor shall delight you."

[Fred]

One more flashback:

We went to the U-M bookstore so my daughter could get a T-shirt as a souvenir of her visit (most of her clothes seem to have college logos on them by now, lol). They had miniature versions of Vienna's cheerleader outfit, for kids.