10.Passage
On the road and seeing too many crosses by the side of the road, Vienna began to wonder how one death affects others' lives. This song is the result.
11.The Atheist Christmas Carol
Christmas is not religious anymore - to many people, at least - and is more a season, so she decided to write a Christmas Carol without any references to Christmas. It's more about the season and the feeling in the air. Her mom is not sure about the title... She has also said it's more about what the Christmas season means to her and those she is close to (ie. family).
In the May04 Forum Q&A, Vienna said:
on the background of the title for "The Atheist Christmas Carol": It was the working title that stuck. I sat down at the piano sometime in December or January a few years ago and started singing images that came to mind when I thought of Christmas. Most of the impromptu lyrics didn't make it into the song ("It's the season of gift wrap and tinsel and pine needles in the carpet..."), but the chorus came immediately: "Don't forget I love you." I knew it was a Christmas carol. But it wasn't a Christmas carol in any traditional sense, not even in the "Silver Bells" or "Let It Snow" sense. So I tagged it with the name "Atheist" because I couldn't think of anything more accurate. This is what an atheist might contemplate around the holiday season, I thought. Kinship and community, human beings' own potential to rescue each other, a little warmth in the long winter.
When we got into the studio I hadn't thought of a proper title, and other people seemed amused by what I was calling it, so it stayed. It also seemed like a way of counterbalancing Shasta and Homecoming, both of which have distinct Christian overtones, and maybe part of me wanted to startle people back into uncertainty about what my own beliefs are.
She also thought about calling it, Season, but the working title stuck.
12.Green Island Serenade
The Warm Strangers "hidden track". A song her parents used to sing to here - about missing home, etc. Originally written about a prisoner exiled on Green Island and it's his lament for missing his homeland which he could catch a glimpse of from his cell window. It also has a political significance for Taiwan and those from Taiwan now in the US. For Vienna, it's a tribute to her parents, although she did finally have to learn the words when she began to perform it and was surprised there were no "horseflies" in it, like she thought when she was a child (simple intonation differences in some of the words). Before recording it, she called her mother and spoke in Mandarin for 30m or so, to get in the mindset and had previously taught her produced (Dave Henry of the Brothers Henry) some basic Chinese so they could converse in Mandarin while recording (hen hau). A song of longing for things left behind.
From her online scrapbook:
Track #12 on Warm Strangers is an old Taiwanese song called Lvdao Xiaoyequ, or Green Island Serenade. My parents sang it to us as a lullabye; pretty much all Taiwanese people of their generation know it. I started singing the song because I was playing a show where the organizer had requested that I do something in Mandarin. Then it became a habit of sorts, something thrown in for variety on the setlist. Eventually I found myself adding it to the show as a kind of thank-you to my parents, and to the Chinese-American community at large, for supporting me in the unusual and risky endeavor of making music my career. For an immigrant group thats built its foundation on math-and-science academics, this is no small gesture.
There have been many meanings attributed to the song, including political ones, and I have my own interpretations. But here are the actual lyrics in Pinyin (as I sing them), and an English translation, adapted with kind permission from
http://ingeb.org/songs/zheludao.html. Much is lost in the conversion, of course. There always is.
Vienna says she started singing it after being aksed to play at a Chinese American Event at the San Francisco Pulic Library. The organizer hopefully asked Vienna if she had written any songs in Chinese. No. Do you sing any covers in Chinese? No, but there is one song my parents used to sing for me.... So, she went home and had her parents teach her what the words relly were and meant.
下面的东西我就不粘贴了,是绿岛小夜曲的歌词(拼音版和英语直译版)