OVER the past few years Regina Spektor has built a following by using her songs to look at things from unconventional angles. Her music is built around her classical-influenced piano playing, with additional flavours from jazz, rock and cabaret and lyrics full of off-kilter vignettes.
Her new album, Far, is
the follow-up to 29-year-old Spektor's commercial breakthrough, Begin To Hope (2006). Songs from that album were heard in an array of television shows (Grey's Anatomy, CSI: NY) and adverts, the album reached the Top 20 and
sold more than 600,000 copies.
The new album indicates that Spektor feels no need to make her music any less weird just because she's now playing to bigger audiences. Laughing With, the album's first single, is a meditation on the reasons people turn to God, both sympathetic and absurd.
"I've always been fascinated with faith and religions," Spektor says. "Sometimes I'm sarcastic about it, and sometimes I'm in awe. Sometimes I feel very connected, and sometimes I feel angry at it. I'm perpetually looking at it differently, like a kaleidoscope."
Asked about the new album's title, she says: "I've been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realisations how little we are, how far we are from everything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust?"
Though she insists the sentiment is universal, she could easily be talking about her own trajectory. Born in Soviet-era Russia to musical parents (her father is a photographer and amateur violinist, her mother a music teacher), Spektor was nine when she settled with her family in the Bronx, attending a Jewish day school and concentrating on her piano studies.
After graduating from college in 2001, she fell in with the punk-inspired anti-folk scene in the East Village, which helped lift the careers of Beck and the Moldy Peaches. She self-released several albums and toured with the Strokes – with whom she shared a producer – and Kings of Leon.
"I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write," she says. "My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room."
In addition to David Kahne, who produced Begin To Hope, Spektor worked with Mike Elizondo (Fiona Apple, Dr Dre) and Jacknife Lee (U2, R.E.M.) on Far. She asked if she could record with Jeff Lynne after noticing his name on the back of a Tom Petty album; she had never heard of Lynne, the mastermind behind the Electric Light Orchestra and producer for artists such as Roy Orbison and George Harrison. For the four songs he produced Lynne put aside his usual walls of harmony and left the focus on her vocals and piano work.
Notably absent from the songs on Far is the character of New York City. Spektor's previous efforts have often been built around memorable lines such as "Remember that time when I found a human tooth down on Delancey?" or "Summer in the city means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage". She still has an eye for precise observation, but the Far songs are filled with images of the beach, birds and a mysterious lake.
"Maybe I am skipping over the city and going from very personal things to the world, from internal experience to giant, far-away-from-space experience," she says. "I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I've seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don't know any more if this is the awesomest way to live."
Far is out now. Regina Spektor plays T in the Park, 12 July www.myspace.com/reginaspektorThe full article contains 680 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
