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Regina Spektor

Posted by Editorial Intern on 01-Jun-06 @ 11:59 AM

HQ: New York, NY NOW PLAYING: Begin To Hope (SIRE) WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW 'EM: Not only can Regina Spektor melt young girls' hearts with her introspective lyrics and off-kilter instrumentation; she's also been known to make a grown man cry. Just don't compare her to Tori Amos. Seriously. YOU LIKE? YOU'LL LIKE: Nellie McKay / Rachel Yamagata / Tom Waits You think you know Regina Spektor, but you have no idea. Journalistic speculation about her upbringing and her explosion onto the NYC music scene reached mythic proportions when her major-label debut, Soviet Kitsch, was released in 2004--but what's the truth? Here's the abridged version: Was she born in Russia? Yes. At what age did she move to the Bronx? Nine-and-a-half. She attended the Conservatory Of Music at SUNY Purchase, so her family must be wealthy, right? Wrong. It's called financial aid. Didn't Regina make a name for herself by climbing the ranks in the burgeoning anti-folk scene on New York's Lower East Side? Not really. Sure, she played shows at the Sidewalk Café, but the community never considered her a full-fledged scene member. Why did it take so long for Soviet Kitsch to come out? You'd have to ask Sire Records. "It's interesting, because I don't have a stage name; I'm not a band," explains Spektor, with delicate traces of a Russian accent. "When people write about me, they write about 'Regina Spektor'--which is me. A lot of the time, they write misinformation or stuff that I never said, or something that they're assuming is true. I know who I am, [so] when I see things written or I have to perform, it really is acting in a lot of ways." Given Spektor's flair for the dramatic, it's no wonder that her latest album, Begin To Hope, expands more on Regina the character, as opposed to Regina the person. Songs such as the staccato ballad "Fidelity," a caveat to future loves, and the longtime fan favorite "Samson," a sultry ode seemingly written from the POV of a modern-day Delilah, prove that Spektor is more than just a singer-songwriter--she's a storyteller. However, she doesn't always understand the stories' origins. "It's really not my place to talk about these things, because I don't fully know where some of [the songs] came from," admits Spektor, once a lo-fi junkie but now a proponent of full--and experimental--instrumentation. "And the stuff that did [come from somewhere], what if I did take away somebody's way of connecting to it? That's not fair to the song. That's just my own ego." Ego aside, Spektor plans to spend the rest of 2006 touring the world, proving to fans both new and old that they should expect the unexpected--from both her as a character and a person. "People expect the truth, or they expect accessible, one-size-fits-all love songs," she says. "What happens is, if you're not writing the truth or you're not writing one-size-fits-all accessible love songs, they don't know what to do with you. That's why I end up having the word 'quirky' in every fucking article about me." --Leslie Simon UNDER THE INFLUENCE What Album's Had The Greatest Influence On You? "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan or Another side of Bob Dylan," Regina Spektor says of two of her favorite albums, "just because whenever I play those records, it's as if I ingest life pills." ALT