Chris Crisman
Regina Spektor
Issue #30
The anomaly of an artist talks about the frenzy that is touring and finding her real voice
By Andrea Bussell
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 2:12pm
On the phone, Regina Spektor's voice is childlike and disarming: she's slow to respond and repeats phrases, punctuating every few words with "like" or "you know?" I caught up with her in mid-October when she was somewhere in the middle of a 20-hour bus ride to Portland. She was probably worn out after touring off and on since April, but this conversation makes her seem — for a moment at least — a shade less enigmatic than the charming, articulate, and brilliantly descriptive woman of other interviews. Not that she minds touring or is any less brilliant for the toll it takes on her.
"It's really a great fucking job," she said, laughing. "You get to, like, do your art. It's really amazing. But actually [pause] … as stupid as this is gonna sound, the hardest part is food. I really like healthy food, and when it's three in the morning and you're stopping at Denny's again, and you have an entire crew and band and you know they're all good to eat their crazy stacks of everything deep-fried, you're just like, 'Oh my god'. It's one of the few things that sometimes makes me, like, 'That's it, I'm not gonna go on tour anymore."
The 26-year-old Spektor plays piano like a virtuoso. She has toured the world with the Strokes and the Kings of Leon, signed a major-label record deal with Sire, released four albums, worked with legendary producer David Kahne (Wilco, Paul McCartney), and received massive praise from nearly every major media outlet in the country. But somehow, she still lacks the level of remove you'd assume from such experiences: she's candid and often describes them in the second person, like she expects you to relate or wants you to be able to. She drew many parallels between her work and mine.
"You probably know this from being a writer," she said emphatically when asked about how she discovered ways to use her voice like an instrument as much as her piano (she often fills in the spaces of songs with stutters, hiccups, and other improvisations rather than, say, bass or tambourine). "The more you live, the more you're finding your real voice, the style that is the truest to you. When I was little, I was really scared about growing up because I thought that adults lose all of their spark and all of their fun. But the more time that's gone by, the more I've had the chance to fall into myself. There's no Dorian Gray stuff going on, you know? If you live more, your voice will reflect it, just like the lines on your face. And once you find your own voice — your real voice — then you just have to feel really comfortable with trying different things."
Spektor doesn't write confessional songs like other female solo artists who play pianos. She has stressed this point repeatedly from the beginning of her career. Instead, she creates alternate worlds and characters — lively, complex, and imaginative — that have more to do with the universal or the abstract than with the personal. And, unlike many of the female artists to whom she’s compared, Spektor's compositional complexities and experiments transcend the banalities of pop music while maintaining, somehow, the sugary hooks that make them addictive. (Don't believe it? Play a track like "Fidelity" off of Begin to Hope, her most recent record, and try to resist being won over by its clap-track beats and pizzicato strings, its rising, unpredictable changes.)
To Spektor’s dismay, nearly everything written about her uses the word "quirky." And while quirky is definitely one way to describe her piano-playing and reluctance to conform to a particular mode of singing, the word doesn't begin to explain why the music industry, the media, and countless listeners have adopted her as a saving grace. We love Regina Spektor because she's an anomaly in every way possible
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