This would mean that Goodnight New York was finally finished in 2012, just in time to be recorded for Aims. “A lot of the songs on Aims were ‘lyrics last’,” Teng said later, adding in 2015 that “I’m a very slow writer, so after I left New York I think it was two years later that I wrote my ‘hey, I moved away from New York’-song.” This wasn’t the only song that needed lyrics. She got on with her life, and the New York experience got more distant. The song was still lying there, needing lyrics, but as Teng got into her studies there were other immediate priorities. So I said, ‘okay, that’s not a song.’ I couldn’t just sing that over and over again.”Īs a consequence, the song got put to the side while the move to Ann Arbor was completed. I was going to call it “Goodnight New York, good night good night.” And that was it. I just couldn’t figure out how to actually put it all together in a way that I really meant – I think in part because there are so many songs written about New York already, it seemed hard to figure out any new things that I could say. But I don’t do well writing on deadlines. I had this notion that I would write my goodbye song to New York, and play it there as a kind of goodbye to my whole community in New York. And then in a frantic last-minute scurry, some lyrics.”Īt the Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse in 2017, she went deeper into the background of the song: “As I was leaving New York we did a couple of shows around the area, and we played one at a great place called the Highline Ballroom. “This one came with a title, and then a whole bunch of music with no lyrics. “Songs come from a lot of different angles,” Teng told a Berkeley audience in 2019. The piece of music was originally composed on guitar, but found its way back to the piano to get its final form. So I wrote this whole piece of music that I actually liked, and I mumbled nonsense lyrics over it for a very long time.” In 2019, she said “I knew from the beginning that I wanted a song about moving from New York to start graduate school in Michigan. In 2010 Teng got accepted into the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. I just got to hang out, and because I was making my living out on the road, I could come home and just enjoy New York as a kind of vacation spot that I lived in.” She would then add in an understated comment, to laughter from the crowd, “I know that this is not most of yours experience.” “I feel like I never got out of the honeymoon phase with New York, because I moved here after I was already touring as a musician so I didn’t have to break into the very intimidating New York music scene. “When I lived in New York it was a really magical period of my life,” she said at a show at New York’s City Winery in 2015. In 2008, Teng relocated to New York City from California. Swaying trains sheltering dreams and little white lies Goodnight, you canyons of steel and light A love song about breaking up with a city.Īfter I am a different man with different eyes She has teased in one of her recent-ish YouTube updates that new material is percolating, but we’ll have to be patient still to see if anything materialises.įor now, we have her already released music, which includes Goodnight New York. Some of these shows has featured long-term collaborators, others have partially included her husband Jacob. More recently she has also started a new family, so there’s plenty to keep her busy.Īll the while, she has kept playing the odd live show, including annual appearances at select locations. While there has been a few collaborations since then, Aims is still her final solo studio album, meaning that Goodnight New York has been serving as a (hopefully temporary) goodbye to her album buying public as well.Īfter the release and touring for Aims was completed, Teng left music as her main career, deciding to contribute towards environmental issues by focusing on renewable energy. Goodnight New York is the last song on Vienna Teng’s fifth album Aims, released on 24 September 2013.
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