Regina Spektor: Imagining a New World

If songwriter and performer Regina Spektor was ever to write a memoir, she says it would probably be fiction. Reality for the standout is often merely a jumping-off point for her relentless imagination. But whether she’ll ever need to write a memoir, in the end, may be a moot thought, since so much of Spektor’s experience is already embedded in her bevy of brilliant songs. Not necessarily literally, of course. Rather, emotionally so. For Spektor, it’s about the feeling of a work rather than its adherence to real-life detail. But that doesn’t mean her life has been boring. In fact, it’s been tumultuous since her birth abroad in the censorship-rich country of Russia. Spektor, who moved to the United States at the age of 9, has often known a tough day. For example, her beloved musical father passed away earlier this year. Now, though, Spektor has a new album out in the world: Home, before and after, which dropped on June 24. It marks her latest marvelous and gut-wrenching chapter.  

“My system is such that I could be going through something emotional,” Spektor says, “but I’ll write a funny song. To me, it somehow fulfills something. I don’t write autobiographical songs in that direct way. But they’re all autobiographical in that my real emotions and real feelings are in them. Overflowing in them.” 

We’re all different. Spektor is quick to admit this. For her, her “happy place” is fiction and her imagination. Others work as journalists and scientists. Literalists. “If I was to write a memoir, all of it would be made up in some way,” Spektor says. She explains that she doesn’t believe her perception of reality is accurate. Instead, she says, she’s best used as an explorer, both outward and inward. Distilling her thoughts is her best gift and a chance at understanding the world. She even once wrote a song—“Left Hand Song”—using only her left hand because her right hand was going through a condition. She wondered if she’d ever be able to use her right hand again. But she didn’t get hung up on it. Instead, the music continued its flow, as much a transport somewhere as a product of work.  

“I think music is so ancient,” Spektor says, “and so pre- pre- pre-everything that if you give yourself over to it, then it’s just the best way we could still travel somewhere. When you add lyrics to that, then that feeling ends up transporting you. Whenever I listen to really great songs, I end up going somewhere, and when the song ends, I come back.” 

Spektor was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union on February 18, 1980. Today, the 42-year-old songwriting virtuoso says that her earliest musical memories involved a grandiose concept. She thought music was God. While hearing classical music in her house and the piano and violin her mother and father played, respectively, she would be filled with huge, swelling feelings. She conceived of the idea that music was “in charge of everything in the world.” It was ironic, in a way, given that in Russia at that time, talk of God was prohibited. Religion was illegal, Spektor says. Later, when she made it to America with her family during Perestroika, a time in the late 1980s when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate from the country, she learned the separation between music and God.   

“My dad,” she says, “had this incredible collection that he had amassed. He was such an audiophile and also such a lover of Western music and especially anything rock.” 

Growing up, she’d listen to popular music like Queen and The Beatles along with pop songs from countries like France and Italy—songs she couldn’t fully understand since they were in different languages. Instead, they were like sonic palates, shapes. Her dad loved playing it all loud. A full-on techy, he tinkered with camera and audio equipment. In America, when she began to learn English, she could finally understand what John Lennon and Paul McCartney were singing. She’d picked up a bit of Italian, too, during her emigration. And in New York City, where her family landed after leaving Russia, she began to study Hebrew and Judaism. But what she missed was her piano, which she’d had to leave behind.  

“We had this little upright piano that my grandfather—” Spektor says, then pauses. “My mom, she’s a piano player. In Russia, she was a conservatory professor. She taught music theory and musicology. She loved to play this little upright that my grandfather, who passed away before I was born, gave to her when she entered the conservatory.” 

Like many kids, Spektor was interested in hearing as many stories about her grandfather as she could. She loved the connection to him, especially through the piano. When her mother played, she’d nestle in, sitting behind her in a chair, straddling her almost like a baby koala. It was a safe place. She listened. Absorbed. Cherished. So, of course, she wanted to learn how to play the instrument, too. This connection to God, to family, to waves of emotion, safety, and thought—that was what the piano represented. Her father, though, wanted Spektor to play the violin like him. Her parents had a friendly rivalry over it that her mother eventually won.  

“The truth was, I kind of had my eyes set on the piano right away,” Spektor says. “It just felt—and it still does—to me, it feels like a place. Not necessarily an instrument, because it’s so vast and so varied. It has, like, different area codes. It’s big. Something about that is really comforting.” 

Spektor was never going to be someone who could carry her instrument onto the subway and be off. The plus-side of that, however, is that she’s never alone on stage, she says. She’s never by herself when she performs. There is this “huge, big friend” she’s had since she was a baby. So, when she had to leave her home at such a young age, the hardest thing was to leave the people she knew. But the next hardest was leaving that piano, forever. Spektor says she perhaps too often leans into the idea of anthropomorphizing objects—giving them feelings, personalities, and lives.  

“I hated the idea it was now going to be in the world and feel abandoned,” she says. “Like it got given up or something.” 

She didn’t have a piano in New York City for two years until the neighborhood in which she and her family lived donated one to them. (“These movers brought it up four flights of our walk-up,” Spektor remembers.) There was even a photograph of the whole thing in the local Bronx newspaper that week. A picture of her mother holding her baby brother and the movers carrying the piano. When leaving a country like Russia, sacrifices must be made. In America, some part of what was lost was restored. And today, of course, Spektor’s home is very much in the news. Its invasion of Ukraine, as of this writing, continues. Spektor finds the whole thing devastating. She is “heartbroken.”  

“My heart is with Ukraine,” she says. “That’s where my grandparents are from. I think it’s insane—one minute there are these gorgeous cities with people, the next minute they’re bombed-out. It’s atrocious. Disgusting. There are not enough powerful words to throw at it.”  

While she mourns the war from afar, Spektor also knows many in the country of her birth abhor it, too. It’s an important nuance to consider from someone who sees nuances and can explain them like a poet-hawk. Indeed, Spektor’s new LP is brimming with idiosyncratic, thoughtful, at times brilliant, and at times titillating detail. Her eye and ear are each so keen that it’s easy to wish her voice was your own inner monologue. Songs like the sticky “SugarMan,” mesmerizing “Loveology,” and operatic “Spacetime Fairytale” stun like discovering a hidden amusement park in your backyard. But for Spektor, the process of making the record never actually began.  

“The genesis of my record,” she says, again pausing. “I don’t even know if my records have a genesis. I think there are people who make records, who write records. They write records; I write songs. And then I end up picking or recording whatever just feels right.” 

Inevitably, on each record, there is a song written something as a lark that lands on the tracklist, another written in her teens, or thereabouts. It’s an eclectic patchwork like a “best of” photo album of her years plunking away at the piano. “It’s all over the place,” she says, with a laugh. In her career, she explains, she’s noticed most people appreciate cohesive work. So, while the songs may not be written in some chronological order, she does put in the effort to make the LP feel tight and connected. 

“A group of songs end up together that somehow makes sense together,” Spektor says. “Even if it makes sense just by contrasting. I think of all my records as cohesive. But that’s not because the songs are alike. Each song is its own little world.” 

Instead of anything linear, she likes to consider the process of listening to one of her records like hopping on a subway car. It stops, the doors open and you’re at the bottom of the ocean. It stops again, you’re facing the vast Milky Way. It stops again, and you’re in someone’s kitchen while they’re scrambling eggs. Spektor’s process and judgment have paid off tremendously. While you may not recognize her in the supermarket, she’s one of the most respected songwriters on Earth. It’s a great balance. She’s likely your favorite artist’s favorite artist. This July, for example, she’s slated to play Carnegie Hall. June 11 was Regina Spektor Day in New York City. These are highs. But there are lows like losing her father, which, she says, can alter you forever. (“I absolutely feel changed,” she says.) Thankfully, for Spektor, in this transformative time, music remains reliably transportive.  

“We haven’t figured out how to go back in time,” Spektor says. “We haven’t figured out how to travel in-person to other planets. We haven’t figured out how to be at the center of the Earth or on the ocean floor in person. But music—melody and rhythm—they are encoded in this way where they’re really the only method of transportation that’s outside of consciousness.”   

Photo by Shervin Lainez