Vienna Teng - Millennium Stage (January 11, 2025)

Subscribe to The Kennedy Center! http://bit.ly/2gNFrtb Live Tonight on Millennium Stage: Songwriter Vienna Teng reemerges this fall with her mashup song pair We’ve Got You—her first new music in over a decade—but her fans have been here the whole time. They’ve packed concert venues even in years between releases, crowdfunded an ambitious music video in hours, and joined by the hundreds when she launched her “music x climate action” Patreon in 2022. That kind of devotion has poured forth since 2002’s Waking Hour, which landed her on NPR’s Weekend Edition, The Late Show with David Letterman, and the top of Amazon’s music charts. Across four more studio albums that followed—the chamber folk of Warm Strangers, the jazz-inflected Dreaming Through the Noise, the indie epic Inland Territory, the bright electro-pop in Aims—Teng has paid homage to her genre-bending heroes like Paul Simon and Tori Amos, while carving a path all her own. Together with her captivating live performances and thoughtful online presence, her work has built a loyal following across generations and continents. Teng’s new mini-EP We’ve Got You reflects the complexity of her life over the past decade: climate change work, community building, parenthood. Two songs, each titled “We’ve Got You,” act like fraternal twins: one an indie-pop tribute to inspiring leaders, the other a chamber-folk paean to unsung caregivers. Played simultaneously, they reveal a new intricate whole: a mashup by design, and a love letter to social movements. Appropriately, Teng now also hosts climate action workshops on tour and online, which participants have described as “rocket fuel” and “the perfect antidote to despair.” It’s an exciting new chapter in the ever-evolving love story between an artist and her audience.