Waaaaay back on april 20th, I went to workplay to see the lovely and talented Ms. Vienna Teng. For those of you who don't know her, she is a pianist, singer and songwriter who's music sounds like it is influenced by classical styles, tori amos, and sarah mclaughlan, among others. She considers herself to be "chamber folk" music.
I heard a song on of hers called "1 bedroom 1 bath" on XM Radio and thought it sounded like something I might like. So, I looked her up on Amazon and loved all the 30 second samples, but it never went further than that. Until... I saw in Black and White that she was going to be here at Workplay, which is one of my favorite venues because it's small and somewhat intimate, and if you get a good seat, you can sit literally 15 feet away from the musician. So, I was curious about going, but not convinced since I had only ever heard about 30 seconds of her songs. I asked around and someone pointed me to internet archive, which has lots of live performances from different artists. It took about 5 minutes for me to fall madly in love and I practically begged my husband to give me $15 and say it was okay for me to go despite that he was feeling under the weather that day.
It was an incredible show. I am so glad I went and I will totally go any time that little lady plays at Workplay.
So, that huge, long, rambling info was all to talk about something that happened during the show. Vienna's real piano was off to one side and tilted on an angle. She had an electric piano in the front of the stage as well. At one point in the middle of the show she came up to the electric piano and said, "I always try to do one or two songs up here on the electric because the people on the side are stuck looking at my shoulder all night..." and someone yelled out "It's a pretty shoulder!"
This makes me wonder what it would be like to be her. She is up on stage in front of lots of people who are watching everything about her. They notice her voice, her facial expressions, her technique on the piano, her clothes, whether or not her toenails are painted and make judgments on all of these things. I can promise you that at least one person made a judgment on whether or not she has a pretty shoulder, quite possibly before it was yelled out from the audience. That's a lot of pressure. If I constantly heard that I had "pretty shoulders", "nice toenails", "great hands", etc. it would do two things after I got over the initial warm fuzzies: 1. It would make me very paranoid knowing that everyone was constantly watching and judging every little aspect of me. 2. I would feel that it would be hard for me to judge the reality of any situation.
A person can't possibly always have pretty toenails, sexy shoulders, perfect pitch, great rhythm and be wonderfully cheery. Yet, there will always be someone around to tell Vienna, and other musicians (and actors and directors and...) that she has pretty shoulders and her voice never fails.
To further aggravate this situation, she also has critics. There are some people who will never like anything about her no matter what she does. Someone will always comment that her lyrics are trite, her style is old fashioned, she's a rip-off, she's an asshole because she dares touch the electric piano instead of only using the baby grand--you get the point.
...And we wonder why musicians go crazy at the end of their careers and write awful crap that they seem to think is brilliant and then start asking for camels at 3:30 am and just seem to live on another planet altogether.
Luckily, Vienna doesn't seem like she's started joining prince world yet, and she seems down to earth enough that maybe she can avoid it. I'll cross my fingers.
