Goodnight New York is the last song on Vienna Teng’s fifth album Aims, released on 24 September 2013. 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.
After 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. More recently she has also started a new family, so there’s plenty to keep her busy.
All the while, she has kept playing the odd live show, including annual appearances at select locations. Some of these shows has featured long-term collaborators, others have partially included her husband Jacob. 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.
For now, we have her already released music, which includes Goodnight New York. A love song about breaking up with a city.
Goodnight, New York
New York goodnight, goodnight
I’ll see you all on the other side
After I am a different man with different eyes
Goodnight, you canyons of steel and light
Twist and turn where your alleyways hide
Swaying trains sheltering dreams and little white lies
Goodnight, goodnight
May you be always heartbreaking
Take a little more than you give
Yeah but when you give, oh my
Goodnight, goodnight
I walk away to remember who I am
In 2008, Teng relocated to New York City from California. “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. “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. 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.”
In 2010 Teng got accepted into the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. This led her to move to Ann Arbor. 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. And that was all I had. So I wrote this whole piece of music that I actually liked, and I mumbled nonsense lyrics over it for a very long time.”
The piece of music was originally composed on guitar, but found its way back to the piano to get its final form. “Songs come from a lot of different angles,” Teng told a Berkeley audience in 2019. “This one came with a title, and then a whole bunch of music with no lyrics. And then in a frantic last-minute scurry, some lyrics.”
At 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. 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. But I don’t do well writing on deadlines. 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. So all I had was the title. I was going to call it “Goodnight New York, good night good night.” And that was it. So I said, ‘okay, that’s not a song.’ I couldn’t just sing that over and over again.”
As a consequence, the song got put to the side while the move to Ann Arbor was completed. Teng got on with her life. The song was still lying there, needing lyrics, but as Teng got into her studies there were other immediate priorities. She got on with her life, and the New York experience got more distant.
This wasn’t the only song that needed lyrics. “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 would mean that Goodnight New York was finally finished in 2012, just in time to be recorded for Aims.
It was pressure to perform it in front of an audience with some proper lyrics that finally made her go ‘oh, all right’ and sit down to scramble some lyrics together. She thought this would at the very least give her some ‘work in progress’ words that would be fine for now, but discovered that the way they came out worked perfectly.
At the Bowery Ballroom in 2017, she said: “I had a live streaming event through a web-based show that I was doing, and I decided I was trying some new material and was gonna do this song, but I still didn’t have any lyrics for it. I had these chords written out, but that day that I had the streaming show, I had actually rushed back from another event that I was doing in Ohio. I came back and was thinking ‘Okay. I’m just gonna write lyrics. They’re just gonna be whatever they are, and maybe they’ll be working lyrics.’ But I think in that moment they did come out the way that I meant them to. Only a bit of tweaking was needed before they were in their final form.”
Somewhere in the woodland
Somewhere in streams
Little life shuffles into the day
Folded wings into flattening veins and fluttering eyes
Somewhere my lifeline still hums and sings
In the mess of all I have thrown away
Hungry now, I am gathering seeds to throw wide
Goodnight, goodnight
May you be always breathtaking
Cold winter, sink your teeth in me
June sun, beat me blind
Goodnight, goodnight
I’m on my way to remembering who I am
It was a bit of a revelation to her that the lyrics that emerged were less about New York than first intended. She had wanted to write a song to commemorate that era of her life, but as she had started living out the next chapter of her life, those aspects had now bled into the song.
“Like many songs it is superficially about the fact that I lived in New York,” Teng said, “and now I live somewhere else. And I had a relationship then, I have a different relationship now. But I hope that as I’ve grown up as a songwriter, the songs become about many things at once. […] It’s not really about New York at all anymore. It’s one of those songs that I think I wrote for myself because I knew the meanings of it would change over time. And I think now for me it now means all the stuff you carry with you, and that you retell the story to yourself of your life. And what it has meant, and where it has taken you. And over time, some of those things stay the same, and other times you come to see it in a new light and you tell a new story about what those things are. And that’s, I suppose, how I sing it now.”
That does not mean that everything about the song is crystal clear to its writer. She told an audience at the Bowery Ballroom in New York in 2015: “I kept kinda adding pieces to it, and it ended up being this super-cryptic song to me. So if you guys can figure out what it’s about, that would be awesome, cos I don’t really know still. There’s lots of things there sort of going on in coded messages here.”
To an audience in Berkeley in 2019, she added: “They don’t make a ton of sense to me, these lyrics. But sometimes lyrics don’t have to make sense in order to… feel sense. To feel right. So if you know what this song means, please let me know.”
It has now been eight years since Aims was released. A Q&A session on her website asks if she intends to keep recording and touring, the answer being “Yes – according to how I want to have fun with it, rather than how to fashion a paycheck or a sense of self-worth out of it. Every musician has a different kind of marriage with music, and mine seems to thrive on a healthy dose of long distance.”
Ah, good. We’ll remain patient, then. As the song goes, “I’ll say goodnight but it’s never goodbye.”
And in your way you remain
You will claim all this space
In my way I’ll remain
Even as it takes my place
In your life, at your side
You were right
I’ll say goodnight but it’s never goodbye
Goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight, goodnight
May you always start breaking my heart again
Good morning, lover
Give me your hand
Today begins and it’s all that we have
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