On Tour: Regina Spektor
Born in Moscow, Regina Spektor, a Russian Jew, fled the anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union with her family when she was 9, emigrating to the Bronx. Unfortunately, she had to leave her piano the one she hoped would be the foundation for a classical career behind.
Fortunately for fans of her often mesmerizing, often quirky style which has drawn comparisons to the likes of Tori Amos, Fiona Apple and others the loss did not deter her.
When she performs, as she will be doing Sunday, Oct. 14, at a 7:30 p.m. concert at the Orpheum Theatre Boston, it is "never a dull moment," promises one national magazine. Early on, The Strokes took her under their artistic wings to provide her a showcase on tour with them.
Major reviewers seem to be in competition to find ways to describe and praise her. Rolling Stone suggested this 20-something with a "fluttery voice" is very much an "oddball unto herself."
She is, wrote Spin magazine in a glowing summation, "genuinely strange." And Time magazine noted that she possesses a singing style that springs "from an immigrant's fascination with her second language."
She's also been called an enormously idiosyncratic composer and lyricist.
NPR observed that Spektor makes "quirky, artfully orchestrated" music with hip-hop rhythms inspired pop melodies and the passion of punk rock.
Spektor began to notice as a teenager that she had the ability to draw interest in what she does. She recalled a trip to Israel at 16 on an arts scholarship. She would make up songs and melodies as she and her fellow travelers hiked in the desert.
"I noticed that some kids would always try to hike next to me and ask me to sing particular songs that I had made up," she said. "So I started trying to remember them. By the end of the trip, all of these kids were telling me that I had to write songs."
She said it had never occurred to her to do so.
"To me, the mentality was you sit at the piano and play Bach or Mozart or Chopin. You didn't ever improvise."
The manner in which she got into music was "totally backwards," she said. "I'd write a song and someone would tell me, 'that sounds like Joni Mitchell,' and I'd go, 'Who?' "
Flashback to her arrival in the United States as a child. A friendship her father made eventually led to Manhattan School of Music professor Sonia Vargas mentoring her.
Vargas taught her until she was 17.
"The Japanese have a proverb: whenever the student is ready, the teacher appears," Spektor said.
"In a lot of ways, that's how my life has been, there's been this kind of harmony with things. I wrote a few songs, then someone heard me and offered me a show; I decided I was ready to tour and then I went on tour with The Strokes. It makes you live your life differently. You can't just sit around, getting angry because you think you're ready. If you were really ready, things would be happening."
She was determined in her quest to make it happen. When The Strokes invited her on tour, she booked her own flights and paid the expenses herself because she had no record label at the time to support her.
While others were taking a break, she accepted the invitation to an open studio on Christmas Day, 2001, recording as many of her compositions as she could.
She put together a dozen tracks, called it "Songs," and sold it at gigs to support herself. Her CD won critical and audience praise.
"People love that record," she said. "They would come to a show and then buy five copies so they could give them as presents."
She never had enough money to produce more than 200 at a time. She had to wait until each batch sold. Then she began offering them through www.cdbaby.com.
"I never thought it would go further than my New York City fans," she said.
Drummer Alan Bezozi, who had played with They Might Be Giants and Freedy Johnston, among others, took notice. He introduced his friend Gordon Raphael, who produced The Strokes, to her. After asking Bezozi, "Who are The Strokes?" Spektor began a concentrated recording session with Raphael, leading to her breakthrough "Soviet Kitsch" album.
The Strokes' Julian Casablancas was so impressed with the results that he issued the invitation to Spektor to join the band on their sold-out North American tour.
The cost of funding the tour herself was very much worth it, she said.
"It opened my eyes to a lot of things you only see in the media. It was pretty surreal and educational at the same time."
"Begin To Hope," her current and fourth release, considered her major label debut, came out in 2005. She had recorded "Songs" in a day, "Soviet Kitsch" in 10 and had the luxury of time ¿ two months in making "Begin to Hope" with producer David Kahne, whose credits include work with Paul McCartney.
She really wanted to play with electronic instruments and bigger arrangements on this record.
"Still, there are some songs where it's really sparse. You don't want to arrange just for the sake of arranging. I had to be careful so the music wouldn't be more fun to make than to listen to," she said.
Spektor seems to appreciate that the creative process contains its own mysteries.
"You don't ever know the true lineage of your songs," she said. "Maybe I'm becoming less of a narrator and more of a character these days. I was always used to observing and writing third-person narrative stories about things I was seeing. Then, as time went on, I started placing myself in these scenes more like an actor."
In that sense, she said she does not completely understand the fascination of people wanting to know the "real" you after listening to your songs.
While she understands the natural tendency to want to know more about someone, it goes beyond that, she said.
"People always want to know what part of the song really happened, they want to know some sort of a 'truth,' " she said.
"For some reason they can see the same actors acting in 17 different movies, using 17 different hair colors, using fake props, changing their voice, changing their accent, being evil or being the victim, and they are okay with that. They understand that it's just a movie, they understand that it's an art. But with music they forget. Music, somehow, is life."
She said she tries to write songs "the way a short story writer writes stories."
"I always thought, 'Why can't I write a song from the point of view of a man or a criminal or an old woman?' Obviously some of it comes from personal things, but it's so much more fun when a concept or idea pops into my head and then I pull on it and out comes this thing that I never expected."
The more she experiences, expected and unexpected, in this world, the more questions she seems to have about where this life is leading, she added.
It all makes for the one of a kind art of Regina Spektor.
Tickets for Regina Spektor's Oct. 14 show at the Orpheum Theatre cost $25 to $35. The Orpheum is located at 1 Hamilton Place in Boston. Call 617-482-0650 or 617-679-0810 or visit www.ticketmaster.com/venue/8318.