EPICANTHUS

Although the three-day festival’s headliners included Radiohead, Beck, Ben Harper, Tom Petty and Cafe Tacvba to name a few, many who attended the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park this past weekend came away with a common experience—the lyrics and voice of self-described “Taiwanese American” Vienna Teng. Think Joni Mitchell meets Tori Amos in a strong alto. The 30-year-old Saratoga, Calif.-native, armed with a string section and the dreamy poetry of her lyrics, has been on Letterman and is all over XM satellite and now people are starting to remember her name. The geek angle here is that Vienna (aka Cynthia Yih Shih) has a CS degree from Stanford and was a software engineer at Cisco Systems for two years. She began recording her compositions at the studios in Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), intending to distribute her music on campus. Many of these recordings were eventually released in her debut album Waking Hour. I dare you. Use the Snap pop-up to hear Vienna sing The Tower. Then, click around her slideshow to go to an interview.