Regina Spektor: High Fidelity

 

Videos by American Songwriter

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If Spektor’s songs actually did veer toward autobiography, what a story they would have to tell. Regina Ilyinichna Spektor was born in Moscow, where she lived until she was nine years old. Her parents – her father a photographer and her mother a music teacher, both Russian Jews – immigrated to the United States to escape religious persecution, eventually settling in the Bronx. She inherited her parents’ musical talent and studied piano and violin, but gravitated toward pop over classical music. At the time, her grasp of rock history was admittedly basic: She knew The Beatles and Dylan, but not the more recent artists to whom she would eventually be compared, such as Fiona Apple, Bjork, and Tori Amos. That didn’t prevent Spektor from gigging at open-mic nights and small New York venues like the Sidewalk Café throughout the early 2000s.

Almost immediately she was lumped in with New York’s burgeoning Antifolk scene, a mini-movement that proffered childlike, often humorous takes on acoustic folk balladry – the musical equivalent of throwing eggs at the city’s venerated folk revival. Spektor’s involvement with this trend, however, was more circumstantial than musical, as she possessed none of the brusque matter-of-factness of Jeffrey Lewis or the potty-mouthed aesthetic of the Moldy Peaches. If anything, she shares with these acts an emphasis on the handmade, a sense that she is crafting her songs well outside the sphere of the music industry.

For a few years, in fact, she really was. Her 2001 debut, a collection of demos titled 11:11, and her follow-up, Soviet Kitsch, were both recorded with no label in mind. Mostly they featured Spektor alone with her piano, occasionally banging on the bench for percussion or bending vowels into odd shapes to emulate a horn or a guitar. In this austere setting, her eccentricities can be particularly disarming. On “Ode To Divorce” from Soviet Kitsch, she peeks out behind your tonsils and observes your molars. “You’ve eaten something minty,” she sings with a wink, savoring the syllables of that last word.

Around the time she was self-releasing Soviet Kitsch, Spektor attracted the attention of some high-profile admirers. The Strokes recruited her as an opening act for their Room On Fire tour and even recorded a song with her, “Modern Girls And Old-Fashioned Men.” After signing with Sire Records in 2004, she met a young director named Adria Petty, who had until then done only a few electronic press kits and short promotional films. Together they shot material for the major-label re-release of Soviet Kitsch, including a video for “Us.” “I was lucky because she hadn’t really made anything visual yet to go along with all the beautiful music,” says Petty, who is the daughter of Tom Petty. “We got to sit down and develop her visual language together. She had not spent a lot of time developing that language or thinking about how to communicate what she wanted, so we got to explore that together.”

That chance meeting developed into a close friendship as well as a long-term collaborative partnership, with Petty directing almost all of Spektor’s videos, including her latest for “All The Rowboats.” “I’m really careful not to be too literal with her videos because the music has such a voice. It’s just a matter of being able to move through these spaces with her and go on a trip with her as the narrator, without having it proscribe how you hear the song or digest the lyrics. Like a good book, it should be personal to whoever’s listening to it.”

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After Soviet Kitsch introduced her to an audience outside of New York, Spektor began working on her follow-up with producer David Kahne, who compared her favorably with artists he had worked with in the past – including Paul McCartney. Building on the DIY balladry of her first two records without losing their sense of intimacy and personality, 2006’s Begin To Hope introduced a more adventurous sonic palette, adding strings, drums, and keyboards. But as Spektor grew more popular thanks to hits like “Fidelity” and “Better,” her music was increasingly dismissed as cutesy at best and infantile at worst, peddling practiced naiveté as unassuming wisdom.

While the slickly produced far certainly did her no favors, those who refuse to take her seriously miss the dark undercurrents of uncertainty and mortality that haunt even her most upbeat songs. Disease is a recurring theme in her lyrics, as are loneliness and disconnection. Her eccentricities alternately amplify and conceal these anxieties, but they never ignore them or assuage the listeners’ fears. Those criticisms, too, discount the hard work and deliberation that goes into Spektor’s music. Neither a pop naïf, as her detractors claim, nor a sui generis artist, as her fans attest, she is simply a hard-working musician who has trained hard and disciplined herself to shift fluidly between intimate club settings and cavernous venues. “I used to see her in smaller places where she was more of a girl from the Bronx trying to get people to pay attention to her,” recalls Petty. “But she’s like one of those grow animals that you put in water and it just gets huge. When you get her behind a piano, all of a sudden a superhero emerges.”

Perhaps Spektor’s problem is that she makes it all look easy. Her piano playing is inventive, her singing completely confident in all its mannerisms, and her compositions seem to burst forth fully formed – strong, singular ideas blossoming naturally into self-contained three- and four-minute pop songs. In this regard, the songwriting proves inseparable from the performance, as the vocal tics convey what the lyrics cannot express. It’s hard to imagine anyone else singing “Oh Marcello” or “All The Rowboats,” not simply because they are so indelibly Spektorian but mainly because every pause, every breath, every vocal swoop and untranscribable utterance sounds like it has been deliberated on a syllabic level. To the extent that her music is calculated, it is always in service to spontaneity and surprise.

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