I saw Vienna Teng at the Me and Thee Coffeehouse in Marblehead this past Friday Night. I’ve been a big fan of hers for decades, and have seen her live countless times.

Most of the music she performed this night was familiar to me, but she’s starting to write new stuff again, and she worked some of it into the show. Over the past decade, she’s really gotten into “loopers”, which allow her to record song pieces live, and then replay them. This allows her to create multi-layered performances live on stage, where she is performing several different parts — first she lays down the harmonies into the looper, then she starts playing the main melody, replaying the harmonies through the looper.

One of her newer compositions is “We’ve Got You”. She was talking about how it’s become more and more necessary to keep two thoughts simultaneously in mind. And then she introduced “We Got You”, explaining how it’s sort of in the sense of “Thank god, we’ve got you to take care of things” and played it on the electronic set up.

Then she turned to the piano, and remarked that “We got you” can have a second meaning, that “we’ve got you, and we have your back” and played a second song, acoustic, and different lyrically and musically from the first on the piano.

And then she said the two songs were actually designed to be played together and played them as a mashup live — the first song, subtitled “Spark” replaying from the looper, and the second, “Comfort” live on the piano, layered together. The two songs work well both independently and even better together.

For her encore, she did something entirely unexpected — she sang the National Anthem. She returned to the theme of keeping two ideas simultaneously in mind. On the one hand, patriotic songs can be unfashionable in some quarters, and the country definitely has problems. On the other hand, her parents, who came from Taiwan, are deeply appreciative of this country and what it offers. And the ideals this country stands for are something to be deeply proud of. And so she started singing a cappella, and not by rote, the way a lot of performers do. Somehow, she managed to infuse it with meaning, not just the blind “rooting for the home team” patriotism that’s so common, but patriotism in the sense of “pride in what this country stands for”. It left me close to tears.