Regina Spektor (2012)
Interview Background
Regina Spektor first popped up on my radar as the guest vocalist on The Strokes’ excellent, overlooked 2003 B-side Modern Girls And Old-Fashion (sic) Men. Since 2006’s Begin To Hope mainstream breakthrough Spektor, has stepped further away from the mainstream, happily existing as a self-sufficient creative and refusing to play up to the three-posts-a-day-on-Instagram regime expected of many commercial artists. As an incredibly private person, I have often found it difficult to coax answers from Spektor which reveal a little about the artist behind her intriguing songs. Regina comes across as such a warm and wonderful person on the phone and in person I can probably overlook the fact it can sometimes be hard work capturing new information in our conversations. A point to make about this interview: while she talks about the fact she is still working on her musical Beauty, within six months Regina officially put the project on ice. Also of note is her Peter Gabriel cover she mentions she’s set to record in this interview ended up being Blood Of Eden, a song I had first recommended to her for this project while chatting backstage in 2010. I couldn’t help but feel a personal thrill when Spektor’s beautiful rendition was included on the And I’ll Scratch Yours album of 2013. I last encountered her backstage at the Sydney Opera House in 2019 in a room overlooking the harbour. I’m still kicking myself I didn’t get a photo with her sitting beside the piano which was in the room - a fake duet with Regina on the keys would have been a great shot for the family album!
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, November 2012.
Regina Spektor - Escape From New York
by Scott McLennan
Although New York-based songwriter Regina Spektor is sitting backstage at the Ruth Eckerd Hall in Tampa, a performing arts venue that resembles a luxurious giant clam shell embedded with 2000 seats, her mind is 8000 kilometres away. The Russian-born 32-year-old is detailing to Rip It Up her inaugural visit to St Petersburg’s breathtakingly expansive Hermitage Museum in July.
Established by Catherine The Great in 1764, the picturesque waterfront institution houses countless antiquities and the largest collection of paintings in the world. Immigrating to the United States as a nine-year-old in August 1989, Spektor’s recent return to her motherland offered her the first chance to visit the celebrated museum.
“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to visit the Hermitage, as I never had the chance to go to St Petersburg while we actually still lived in Russia. I’ve read a lot about it and I knew some of the history and I even avoided the movie Russian Ark, because I didn’t want my first time seeing the museum on a screen, I wanted to actually be there. To really see the Hermitage you’d probably have to spend a year there, but the promoter hooked us up with this special tour of the museum with a super-passionate guide. We still had the chance to feel it and take it in. I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful St Petersburg is. It’s striking – the river, the colours of the palaces… it’s just incredible.”
During her last visit to Adelaide in April 2010, Regina Spektor marvelled at the Central Market. Does the songwriter keep notes of the special places she discovers so she can return to them on subsequent tours?
“You know I really wish I did, but I’m unfortunately not organised enough to do that. I remember the Central Market – it’s the big indoor market, isn’t it? I didn’t have any record of it but you bringing it up flooded with me memories. That’s good – at least my brain works. I enjoyed the art museum in Adelaide, too.”
Since her last appearance in Adelaide, Spektor has loved (wedding long-time partner and tour mate Jack Dishel in December last year) and lost (her touring cellist Daniel Cho drowned in Lake Geneva in 2010), but the pianist effortlessly brushes off questions she deems too personal with a cheery giggle.
“I don’t like to talk about private things,” she subtly admonishes when asked about her wedding reception’s music, before conceding she’s looking forward to celebrating her first wedding anniversary while touring Australia with Dishel. “It’s fun to have summer in the winter! It’s a really good time to escape New York, spending December in Australia.”
Considering her hit albums Begin To Hope, Far and this year’s What We Saw From The Cheap Seats have filtered everyday minutiae through her perceptive blue eyes, Spektor’s reticence is interesting. Having tackled loneliness, heartache and death in her lyrics, fans already feel a strong connection to the Russian-born performer thanks to her revealing songs. They might be wrapped in Spektor’s habitual musical idiosyncrasies, but eloquent tracks such as The Call, Samson and latest single How whisper to listeners like a best friend. The flippant lo-fi punk thrills of Begin To Hope’s That Time can’t hide the fact it’s ostensibly a jarring song about a partner’s drug overdose, but Spektor ducks addressing her own drug experiences.
“I think in our world it’s so hard to tell what is a drug and what isn’t. All around us people are having a hard time and they sometimes lean on things. Sometimes I think, ‘Wow - all of America is running on coffee, or money, or the internet’. It’s kind of a universal and ancient thing to want to lean on something, but you don’t want to lean on it too much. I think people need to try to find their way with things.”
So what are the little luxuries that get Regina Spektor through the day?
“Luxuries? I think time is the greatest luxury. It’s really precious when we have it, so I think time well spent is a luxury.”
Time isn’t something Spektor has had a great deal of since 2004’s major label debut Soviet Kitsch. Since then she’s contributed to multiple Hollywood soundtracks, performed for US President Barack Obama and commenced work on the score for Broadway musical Beauty, a modern retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale. When Rip It Up spoke to Spektor two years ago, she suggested that she’d completed 70 percent of Beauty’s music.
“Well since we last spoke it’s now 50 percent!” she laughs. “Broadway is interesting - I feel that the more we work on it, the less done it is. It is an amazing process though and at this point I should give up gauging how ‘done’ Beauty is, because obviously I can’t tell any more if that’s what I said last time we spoke. I am really excited about how much I’ve been learning through the process of making it - it’s been fascinating to learn about how Broadway works.”
Does putting all this love and effort into Beauty have a negative effect when it comes to attempting to write non-Beauty songs?
“No, I actually believe the more creative things you do the more you will be inspired and the more you can achieve. If you are making progress in some aspects of art then all of a sudden it will make you do five other things you didn’t even realise you wanted to do. It’s good to branch out and do different things and the more you do, the better. Art begets art, I think.”
Spektor’s currently finalising her contribution to another long-mooted project. After Peter Gabriel released his Scratch My Back covers album in 2010 (featuring a version of Begin To Hope’s Apres Moi), he invited the acts he’d covered to perform one of his songs in return. Spektor says she has almost completed her submission.
“I’m actually in the process of working on a track and I’ve been trying to figure out my own way into it. Cover songs are really hard for me in the first place – it’s not my forte and I didn’t grow up playing a lot of them. I hesitate to name which song I’m doing in case I fuck it up and it never gets released - I can’t tell you what it is in case it changes and I’ve given you false information. Hopefully when I come back from all the tours right after Christmas I can record it, so I am excited about it.”
What We Saw From The Cheap Seats (Warner)
Unpublished Interview Material
Hi Regina, how are you today?
“I’m backstage getting ready for a show in Tampa, Florida. It’s really nice here, so it’s ironic that there are no storms in Florida but there are in New York. I’ve left the storms behind. We didn’t have power for a week, but that’s the small stuff. A lot of people were stuck – elderly people trapped in high-rises, people who were entirely flooded and lost their homes – so in the grand scheme of things we were lucky.”
Was All The Rowboats a song that came to you while checking out art galleries around the world?
“It’s actually an older song, but my parents have always taken me to museums since I was really little. It’s probably just cumulative experience of a lifetime of going to different museums.”
You have sung of dreams you’ve had in both Chemo Limo and Hotel Song – do you have any recurring dreams?
“Dreams? You know, it’s hard to know. I dream a lot, but lately I’ve been waking up and forgetting them. My dreams are pretty bizarre, as you might expect! (giggles) Almost all of my lyrics come more from imagination and art, books and films I’ve seen rather than dreams. I don’t usually write stuff from my life in that direct way – more so my range of experiences grows as my range of emotions grows. It’s hard to explain – it sounds so pretentious most of the time trying to describe the songwriting process that I’ve given up. Even hearing myself say it makes me want to hurl a little.”
Regina Spektor first popped up on my radar as the guest vocalist on The Strokes’ excellent, overlooked 2003 B-side Modern Girls And Old-Fashion (sic) Men. Since 2006’s Begin To Hope mainstream breakthrough Spektor, has stepped further away from the mainstream, happily existing as a self-sufficient creative and refusing to play up to the three-posts-a-day-on-Instagram regime expected of many commercial artists. As an incredibly private person, I have often found it difficult to coax answers from Spektor which reveal a little about the artist behind her intriguing songs. Regina comes across as such a warm and wonderful person on the phone and in person I can probably overlook the fact it can sometimes be hard work capturing new information in our conversations. A point to make about this interview: while she talks about the fact she is still working on her musical Beauty, within six months Regina officially put the project on ice. Also of note is her Peter Gabriel cover she mentions she’s set to record in this interview ended up being Blood Of Eden, a song I had first recommended to her for this project while chatting backstage in 2010. I couldn’t help but feel a personal thrill when Spektor’s beautiful rendition was included on the And I’ll Scratch Yours album of 2013. I last encountered her backstage at the Sydney Opera House in 2019 in a room overlooking the harbour. I’m still kicking myself I didn’t get a photo with her sitting beside the piano which was in the room - a fake duet with Regina on the keys would have been a great shot for the family album!
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, November 2012.
Regina Spektor - Escape From New York
by Scott McLennan
Although New York-based songwriter Regina Spektor is sitting backstage at the Ruth Eckerd Hall in Tampa, a performing arts venue that resembles a luxurious giant clam shell embedded with 2000 seats, her mind is 8000 kilometres away. The Russian-born 32-year-old is detailing to Rip It Up her inaugural visit to St Petersburg’s breathtakingly expansive Hermitage Museum in July.
Established by Catherine The Great in 1764, the picturesque waterfront institution houses countless antiquities and the largest collection of paintings in the world. Immigrating to the United States as a nine-year-old in August 1989, Spektor’s recent return to her motherland offered her the first chance to visit the celebrated museum.
“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to visit the Hermitage, as I never had the chance to go to St Petersburg while we actually still lived in Russia. I’ve read a lot about it and I knew some of the history and I even avoided the movie Russian Ark, because I didn’t want my first time seeing the museum on a screen, I wanted to actually be there. To really see the Hermitage you’d probably have to spend a year there, but the promoter hooked us up with this special tour of the museum with a super-passionate guide. We still had the chance to feel it and take it in. I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful St Petersburg is. It’s striking – the river, the colours of the palaces… it’s just incredible.”
During her last visit to Adelaide in April 2010, Regina Spektor marvelled at the Central Market. Does the songwriter keep notes of the special places she discovers so she can return to them on subsequent tours?
“You know I really wish I did, but I’m unfortunately not organised enough to do that. I remember the Central Market – it’s the big indoor market, isn’t it? I didn’t have any record of it but you bringing it up flooded with me memories. That’s good – at least my brain works. I enjoyed the art museum in Adelaide, too.”
Since her last appearance in Adelaide, Spektor has loved (wedding long-time partner and tour mate Jack Dishel in December last year) and lost (her touring cellist Daniel Cho drowned in Lake Geneva in 2010), but the pianist effortlessly brushes off questions she deems too personal with a cheery giggle.
“I don’t like to talk about private things,” she subtly admonishes when asked about her wedding reception’s music, before conceding she’s looking forward to celebrating her first wedding anniversary while touring Australia with Dishel. “It’s fun to have summer in the winter! It’s a really good time to escape New York, spending December in Australia.”
Considering her hit albums Begin To Hope, Far and this year’s What We Saw From The Cheap Seats have filtered everyday minutiae through her perceptive blue eyes, Spektor’s reticence is interesting. Having tackled loneliness, heartache and death in her lyrics, fans already feel a strong connection to the Russian-born performer thanks to her revealing songs. They might be wrapped in Spektor’s habitual musical idiosyncrasies, but eloquent tracks such as The Call, Samson and latest single How whisper to listeners like a best friend. The flippant lo-fi punk thrills of Begin To Hope’s That Time can’t hide the fact it’s ostensibly a jarring song about a partner’s drug overdose, but Spektor ducks addressing her own drug experiences.
“I think in our world it’s so hard to tell what is a drug and what isn’t. All around us people are having a hard time and they sometimes lean on things. Sometimes I think, ‘Wow - all of America is running on coffee, or money, or the internet’. It’s kind of a universal and ancient thing to want to lean on something, but you don’t want to lean on it too much. I think people need to try to find their way with things.”
So what are the little luxuries that get Regina Spektor through the day?
“Luxuries? I think time is the greatest luxury. It’s really precious when we have it, so I think time well spent is a luxury.”
Time isn’t something Spektor has had a great deal of since 2004’s major label debut Soviet Kitsch. Since then she’s contributed to multiple Hollywood soundtracks, performed for US President Barack Obama and commenced work on the score for Broadway musical Beauty, a modern retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale. When Rip It Up spoke to Spektor two years ago, she suggested that she’d completed 70 percent of Beauty’s music.
“Well since we last spoke it’s now 50 percent!” she laughs. “Broadway is interesting - I feel that the more we work on it, the less done it is. It is an amazing process though and at this point I should give up gauging how ‘done’ Beauty is, because obviously I can’t tell any more if that’s what I said last time we spoke. I am really excited about how much I’ve been learning through the process of making it - it’s been fascinating to learn about how Broadway works.”
Does putting all this love and effort into Beauty have a negative effect when it comes to attempting to write non-Beauty songs?
“No, I actually believe the more creative things you do the more you will be inspired and the more you can achieve. If you are making progress in some aspects of art then all of a sudden it will make you do five other things you didn’t even realise you wanted to do. It’s good to branch out and do different things and the more you do, the better. Art begets art, I think.”
Spektor’s currently finalising her contribution to another long-mooted project. After Peter Gabriel released his Scratch My Back covers album in 2010 (featuring a version of Begin To Hope’s Apres Moi), he invited the acts he’d covered to perform one of his songs in return. Spektor says she has almost completed her submission.
“I’m actually in the process of working on a track and I’ve been trying to figure out my own way into it. Cover songs are really hard for me in the first place – it’s not my forte and I didn’t grow up playing a lot of them. I hesitate to name which song I’m doing in case I fuck it up and it never gets released - I can’t tell you what it is in case it changes and I’ve given you false information. Hopefully when I come back from all the tours right after Christmas I can record it, so I am excited about it.”
What We Saw From The Cheap Seats (Warner)
Unpublished Interview Material
Hi Regina, how are you today?
“I’m backstage getting ready for a show in Tampa, Florida. It’s really nice here, so it’s ironic that there are no storms in Florida but there are in New York. I’ve left the storms behind. We didn’t have power for a week, but that’s the small stuff. A lot of people were stuck – elderly people trapped in high-rises, people who were entirely flooded and lost their homes – so in the grand scheme of things we were lucky.”
Was All The Rowboats a song that came to you while checking out art galleries around the world?
“It’s actually an older song, but my parents have always taken me to museums since I was really little. It’s probably just cumulative experience of a lifetime of going to different museums.”
You have sung of dreams you’ve had in both Chemo Limo and Hotel Song – do you have any recurring dreams?
“Dreams? You know, it’s hard to know. I dream a lot, but lately I’ve been waking up and forgetting them. My dreams are pretty bizarre, as you might expect! (giggles) Almost all of my lyrics come more from imagination and art, books and films I’ve seen rather than dreams. I don’t usually write stuff from my life in that direct way – more so my range of experiences grows as my range of emotions grows. It’s hard to explain – it sounds so pretentious most of the time trying to describe the songwriting process that I’ve given up. Even hearing myself say it makes me want to hurl a little.”
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