Pandora often plays new music I end up enjoying. That’s its job.

Yesterday, asked to play music similar to Hayley Westenra, it completely floored me by introducing Vienna Teng’s Lullaby for a Storm Night. She describes the song this way in a YouTube video from a Dusseldorf performance:

It’s a relatively old song of mine. I wrote it when I was 17 years old, when I was taking an English class where I had to write a very long paper, and I didn’t want to write the paper, so I wrote the song instead.

This is a song about a rainy evening – a thunderstorm. The thunderstorm went on all night. It rained so hard that – because my school is a California school and we’re not used to weather – it actually flooded the whole school, so I had one more day to finish the paper for English class.

The songs on Teng’s MySpace page are even better. Topping it all off, she’s a computer scientist with a BS from Stanford.

I know where I’ll be on December 5th.