“Music can be an incredible vehicle for things that are hard to look at without it,” says Vienna Teng, 45, a singer–songwriter who could also be called a composer, an arranger, a one-woman a cappella group. “I’m often trying to create the dinner party where the food is great, and the company is great, and you can talk about real stuff. If my songwriting had a mission statement, that would be it.”

Teng calls her music “chamber folk” or “indie pop.” From her home in Washington, D.C., she tells me, “I worked with a producer who called my work ‘sneaky pop.’ He meant that it was poppy, but I was sneaking something else in there.” The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants (her birth name is Cynthia Yih Shih), Teng was influenced as much by Beethoven, Mozart, and Dvořák as by Paul Simon and Fiona Apple, but she really sounds like no one else. She sings against multiple tracks of her own voice, against click tracks or the Founders, young virtuosi who’ve listened to everything, streamed through all genres, and emerged as omni-musicians.

Back in 2006, Teng had a song, “Whatever You Want,” that deserved to be everywhere. When you are in its presence, it’s just for you. It sounds simple, but the rhythms, the auto-harmonizing—it was ahead of the 00s, way ahead of now. A tune beyond us, yet ourselves. “He knows every loophole, the hard-to-find print / Massages the numbers ’til they fit / And every time you ask him for another vanishing act / He half-smiles, as if to say: / ‘Whatever you want, whatever you want / Whatever you want is fine by me.’”

“I thought I could write a song about someone who was so into a relationship that they would follow someone’s lead, and I immediately got bored and thought, Well, what else can I do?” says Teng. “I went from being chipper to being subversive to being passive-aggressive. The first verse is about someone in the accounting department, and the second verse is about the stay-at-home trophy wife. Neither of these people are who you assumed they are. Maybe they used to mean it, but they don’t anymore. The plot of the song is that they turn in their badges and file their divorce papers.”

When Teng tours the U.S. this fall, expect to hear “In Another Life,” from her 2009 album, Inland Territory. I saw Teng open with this at the Iridium, in New York. It sounds and feels like cabaret, and like many songs in the genre, Teng goes dark, telling a story about Tiananmen Square, the last time the masses marched for democracy. “In another life / You and I / Were Red Guards in training / Side by side / We marched on Tiananmen / Turned our own parents in / For hoarding rice / And in the Great Leap forward / We crawled on our bellies and died / And a blood orange sky / Gave a cry / Of next time ’round.”

“If I was plonked down in any other point in history, it probably would have been a lot harder for me,” says Teng. “My grandparents fled Mainland China as the Communist revolution was sweeping the country, ended up in Taiwan, had their kids, immigrated to the U.S., and that’s how I am where I am. But there were a lot of people who tried to flee and didn’t make it, or didn’t flee and lived through all that. My life could have been cut short.”

Teng was lucky. She got to be here, sneaking in all her complexity: pop with a phantom thread. “Going this path served me well. It put my self-absorption to good use.” Vienna Teng absorbs us all. If there’s still a future, she will be part of it. And you can be part of it, too, at the Montalvo Carriage House Theatre, in Saratoga, California, on September 13, the first stop on her 2024 tour.

Vienna Teng tours the U.S. from September 13 to November 24

David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He writes about music and is the author, most recently, of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. You can read his Substack here