网址拥有者原文（据我遥远的记忆，这个网址的拥有者是论坛里活跃的某个VT粉丝）：
This is my attempt to gather the stories Vienna tells at her performances (or via her web site about what she thinks each of her songs is about or why she wrote them. There are other stories she tells about her songs in addition to what they mean to her, but you'll just have to go catch her live to hear those. Please contact me here if you have any additions or corrections to contribute. Thanks!

4.Daughter
Vienna's father wasn't always happy with her career changes (probably preferring she'd had stayed in medicine) and was of course weary of a music career for her. This song was written for him (although she says he prefers Say Uncle). Vienna says she tried to write it from his point of view, but in the end, believes it's more from her own, but isn't that how these things go?
5.Between
In Charlotte, when talking about "Between" Vienna said something about writing the song when she was taking ballroom dancing lessons and that from the idea of a waltz she started thinking about sets of 3 and how they fit together. She said that a woman (i think she was in Vienna's dance class?) wanted to use the song for her wedding until she listened closer to the lyrics.
Another Warm Stranger asked Vienna about the song at a show once: I have a little something to add - "Between" is one of my favorites and I've never heard her play it live, hence I never got to hear the story on it. So I asked her about it after a show a few months back, and told her that I had two interpretations, both of which seemed to work.
One interpretation was that it was about a couple drifting apart because one person suspected that the other was cheating. The other interpretation was that it was about a couple having a baby, and they were focusing all of their attention on the baby, the "third one" who basically sucked away all of their energy and left them with little time or affection for each other.
Anyway, she told me that neither of those interpretations was what inspired the song, but that they were both correct. :>
To explain a little better, she originally conceived the song as a way of sorting out her feelings about a long-distance relationship, but since that didn't seem to make for a very interesting song, she threw in one of her patented fictional elements, an unnamed "third one" who was coming between them. She was aware that it could be construed as a love triangle, or it could be construed as a baby, and she left it ambiguous on purpose.
Vienna also says she wrote this during a "clever phase" of hers. Being about a third "thing" between two, it, of course, had to be in 3/4 time, with 3 verses, with 3 voices in the chorus, the main one "between" the other two...
At another show, Vienna said she took ballroom dancing in college and she wrote this sort of waltz for her instructor, who absolutely loved it.
6.Say Uncle
Written about an Uncle who died when she was a teenager (16). It was the first close family death that she was really aware for. This is his song. She says it's her father's favorite song and it includes a few tidbits (Where's Waldo, she says) of songs her Uncle liked and that were played at his funeral: Love me Tender, Bridge over Troubled Water, and Wind Beneath my Wings.

专辑：Warm Strangers
1.Feather Moon
A friend of Vienna's suggested she paint a picture, but with words. so Feather Moon is a painting really; the lyrics don't have any real or explicit meaning, but rather create an image in your mind. One person reported Vienna said it was inspired by Bolero...the repetition, simplicity, build-up.
After listening to her new album for the first time, Vienna asked her sister what she thought. She said it's all very good, except for that one song that just droned on and on endlessly about breathing in and out and all that. "But that's the beauty of it. It's supposed to do that. That's the WHOLE POINT." said Vienna (or something to that effect.)
2.Harbor
A complicated (musically) song in odd time signatures - 7/4, 5/4, etc. It's obviously about those who have loved ones far away. She wrote it only a couple weeks before the Warm Strangers session and was sort of surprised it made it on the album.
3.Hope on Fire
The usual story of this song is that it's 2/3 male - co-written with her WS producer, Dave Henry, and drummer Jim Batcho. In MN, she explained that it is about a nascent activist. Someone who got so angry with the way things are that they felt compelled to do something about it. She said as an aside that she's never really felt that way herself.

7.Shasta (Carrie's Song)
"A freaking out song disguised as a perky song". After hearing about the topic in the news, Vienna tried to find a different perspective. A girl is driving home (past Mt. Shasta) after having visited an abortion clinic and making a decision to keep her baby. See Homecoming and Anna Rose. They weren't written to be related to each other, but sort of seemed to connect themselves afterwards. The pamphlet-handing-out evangelist in the middle of the song, Vienna assures us, is just a fictional character; no reason to be alarmed.
8.Homecoming (Walter's Song)
From old www site:
A few days after the Berklee Songwriting Workshop in August, I sat in a friend's Jersey City apartment attempting to play her boyfriend's guitar. As I fumbled through some simple bar chords, I found myself singing "got a whole congregation living in my head these days..." and decided to write it down. On the train back to Boston that one lyric grew into a story about a drifter from Raleigh, stopping in a tiny middle-of-nowhere Arizona town in the dead of winter. Funny how that works.
As with Undone, I started playing it at shows before it was finished (on the piano, not the guitar. Trust me, this is a good thing). I jokingly called it That Song With Twaaaang for a while, until someone in the Red Rock audience one night -- a woman named Stacey Gladman, for the record -- suggested the title "Homecoming."
Interesting that here, Walter hasn't become a truck driver yet - just a drifter.
Other notes:
A balding lonely trucker drives into an Arizona desert cafe late on night. Only after she wrote it and began putting the album together did she make the connection that Walter was Carrie's old boyfriend.... Started while dreaming/thinking of being on the road (touring) all the time and wondering how truck drivers do it. She figured they must survive by learning to make home be wherever they are.
9.Anna Rose
See lullabye for a stormy night - Anna Rose, a young girl heard this song, liked it, drew a picture about it, and sent it to Vienna. (The girl heard it because Vienna had made a demo of Lullabye for a friend who brought it with her one night while baby-sitting and found the little girl would listen quietly and attentively when she played the tape, so she kept playing it! Anna continued listening and drew a picture about it then.) Vienna wrote this song to return the favor. Some have postulated Anna is Carrie and Walter's daughter, giving tons of joy to Carrie who now applauds her decision.

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）

专辑：Dreaming Through the Noise
1.Blue Caravan
Vienna is proud of this one because it's one of the first ones she was able to write while on tour. It actually started while waiting to pick up her rental vehicle (anyone guess what it was?: >) (from an expensive NY garage, on her way to the Kent State Folk Festival and the rest was sort of written on the way on I90). It isn't about that, but that's how it started. She says the words were perhaps inspired by a play she had seen sometime back: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In particular, she says the song it's about someone who is beginning to realize that all the relationships he/she believed in are actually illusions. Relates personally to Vienna through her life touring on the road, away from many of her own relations.
2.Whatever you Want
Written 22Apr05, first performed 23Apr05 at the Bazaar Cafe, home of Vienna's first gig where no one could really sing along to Enough to go By. This song, too, is an attempt to write a perky song. Vienna has called it a sort of "revenge of the cubicle" type song. She says it's about someone fed up with the corporate shenanigans/scandals of a boss and turns him in. (Is it a boss, a husband, both?)
3.Love Turns 40
This song that debuted in Dec 2004. Written summer, 2004. Ponderings on what happens to love when you're over 40 with kids, family obligations, etc., a different kind of love song. Vienna described it (at least) once as sort of a pre-emptive attack on her imaginary coming mid-life crisis.

4.I Don't Feel so Well
Debuting in early 2005 this song was insipired by a high school freshman English teacher who hated the phrase "I don't feel so well" vs. "I don't feel so good." Vienna wrote this to investigate what it might mean to really not "feel well" (in the sense of not being able to emotionally feel, vs. not being able to physically feel - the former being a bit easier and perhaps more interesting for a songwriter.). Vienna also says she was directly inspired to write the song after seeing a performance of one of Marika's other project bands: Two Foot Yard.
5.City Hall
Debuting late 2005, this song is about getting married as a gay couple in City Hall- something that took place for a brieft while in San Francisco and other places aorund the country in early 2005. Vienna wanted to write a song about this subject for a while, but couldn't quite figure out how to do it. She eventually settled on the song as we know it.
Vienna also says this was an attempt to write a love song without reference to gender, partially inspired by Jeanette Winterson's novel, Written on the Body.
6.Nothing without You
Written in Feb, 2005, Vienna sometimes calls this her "anti-Valentine's day song". At one show, Vienna said She said she actually had a fantastic Valentine's Day. However, many of her friends didn't - so she wrote this song for them. At least sometimes, Vienna plays guitar on this one.
In a December 2006 Q&A, Vienna said:
A fundamental fear of being alone, really. I spend a lot of time on my own, and usually it's fine. But it's strange how terrifying loneliness can be when it strikes, sometimes in the midst of a perfectly decent evening or a lively party, and I started to wonder how other people deal with it. I had a discarded song from years ago that had the line "a thousand papercuts/and the sheet in my hand." That's more or less where it started.
I still like other people's interpretations better, to be honest. Especially those who read it as a song about spiritual hunger.