June 15, 2006

Words usually fail when trying to describe Regina Spektor's music, though here are a few attempts: playful, serious, mischievous, intense, classical, original, stately, theatrical, funny, sad... you can see where I'm going with this. You can't use a blanket descriptor because Spektor's songs tend to wriggle out from beneath the covers; they may start as just a play on words, then balloon into heart-shredding explorations of the dark corners of emotion, before changing back into a silly lullaby. The breadth of expressiveness she wrings out of her songs -- the sheer invention of them -- is staggering, which makes it no surprise that she was plucked from the obscurity of Lower Manhattan's boho arts scene (by the Strokes, it might be worth mentioning), brought on tour and later signed to Sire Records.

Her second major-label release, "Begin to Hope," expands upon the possibilities of its predecessor, "Soviet Kitsch," both sonically and lyrically. The Russian-born, Bronx-raised Spektor makes music that spills over with the joy of life, even when she's singing about sorrow and loss. I interviewed her at her hotel the day before she played Seattle on a recent tour. As she sat down, her staggeringly beautiful (photos really don't capture her), wide-open face was looking furrowed and perplexed because of the CD of ringtones she'd just been handed. The label was eager to get her approval on them before sending them out for sale.

MSN Music: Speaking of ringtones, do you enjoy the collision of art and commerce?

Regina Spektor: Actually, in a lot of ways, I do, which is surprising even to myself. But I think it's because I had a lot of preconceived notions about business in general, and it was a very scary word to me, and I knew that, in my mind, I was really not cut out for business, and I was like the type of person that could never be involved in it. I felt artsy, you know? A little bit different in some ways. And from childhood, it was drilled into my head by teachers and family and friends -- "Oh, that's just Regina, that's her thing." That's your reputation. Like, everybody has their part in the sitcom, and that was my part. But the thing is, there's so much art in things that are not just art, and as I was growing up, I started seeing it more. I started seeing the art in whoever's passionate about whatever they're doing, you know? Fixing cars. There could be a day when you're just watching somebody talk about it, and they're in that zone. They're in the same zone that you're in when you're writing your songs. And it's the same thing in business.

The music business is still so people-run. It's so based on relationships and these huge companies have tons of little tendrils sticking out, and they're all just holding on person-to-person. Like a person from Warner Brothers knows all of the people on these radio stations and goes and visits them, and they go and they live lives parallel to each other. They know about each other's kids, they go to a convention once a year where they just get blasted, and... that's so rare. It's not the most lucrative industry, especially now. Music business lawyers, they're still really wealthy in comparison to just, like, a lot of people, but they're not as wealthy as corporate or political lawyers, or whatever. They could be making a lot more money, and they have a lot of skills. Why do these people stay? Why is somebody a booking agent or a promoter of a club as opposed to like a PR person of a hotel or something? People are just more dramatic, they're more eccentric, and they care about the arts. A lot of -- there are some that are just in it for the money -- but for the most part, if somebody just cared about money, they could be in a lot of other places where they'd make more money. Somewhere in there is a humanity.

It's easy to take everything you just said with such warmth and be very cynical about it.

And on different days I range. I'll have a day when I'm like, "F--- them all! They're playing with my mind," you know? And then other days, it's just like, "Oh, they're so cool," or, "Wow, you really get me." And then other days, it's, "You don't understand me at all." It's a very melodramatic relationship.

Major labels aren't in the business of selling records; they're in the business of selling millions of records, and millions of ringtones and so forth. But you come to this situation with music that's really distinctive and original and about something -- music that comes from a real place. Is it scary?

Yeah. The thing I keep on coming up against is, you know, humans. We get used to a good thing so quickly, it's almost like it never was the other way, and we want the next thing. And that's a gift. That allows us to forget that we were starving just two days ago, and now we're eating all the time, so we can start thinking about philosophical things as opposed to just being stuck in this survival mode. I never, ever thought that people would see a commercial potential in my stuff. I thought, if any label it would ever want to deal with me, [it] would be some sort of a very independent, very tiny little boutique. And none of them ever approached me. It was always major labels from the very beginning, and I kept on waiting. I was like, "OK," you know, "you cool, indie, credible, awesome people -- come on." Nothing. It was always the big, commercial labels, and it was really surprising to me. Then I thought they just want me there because every big label has a couple of those people --

The Sonic Youth-style head on the wall to attract other artists.

-- Yeah. I wasn't dumb. When I went to Interscope, they were not selling me Black Eyed Peas, they were talking about Beck. But then I thought, OK, well, that's kind of a compliment. I'll just be like the artist babe. But once you get there and you see the treatment that the [token artist] sometimes gets -- it becomes painful. You're like, "Well, I don't just wanna be the artist! Why aren't you putting my records in stores like you said you would? Why am I getting e-mails from people that they can't find my record in Texas?"

Right. "Where are my ringtones?"

Yeah! And then you're caught in this Catch-22, and you're banging your head against the wall, and they're spending money on, like, Paris Hilton and all these things. And still, you already forgot that you've reached more people than you would have giving away records out of your backpack on the Lower East Side. And I've gone to England and to Europe and toured. But still, there are things -- you can go from that level of starvation, and you're still looking up at the stars, you know?

Has that double consciousness started to affect the songs you're making? "Begin to Hope" obviously sounds really different from your other records. It doesn't sound like a Black Eyed Peas album or anything, obviously, but there's a whole other layer of instrumentation and texture since "Soviet Kitsch," and that was such a huge progression from the early few. Now that you're singing to a much bigger audience, how does that change what you want to sing about?

See, this is a really hard thing to explain. My records before sounded a certain way because of what I had. The very first one, "11:11," was just -- I had just started writing songs, and I had just come in contact with jazz for the first time in my life, and I made it under fluorescent light and in State University of New York, in student-run studios and all this stuff. I saved up and emptied my bank account and sent it to Canada, 'cause it was cheaper to get it printed there, got my 1,000 CDs. And it seemed so small, but to somebody, that's like a record. You know what I mean?

Absolutely.

And then the "Songs" record was -- I was playing these little residencies at these little hole-in-the-wall clubs, The Living Room and Sidewalk Café, and, basically, I would just play a whole lot of music. I was writing all the time. And I would play a song and then I'd play it the next week, and then I wouldn't play it anymore, and someone would ask for that song, and I wouldn't remember it, 'cause I'd written already like five other songs. And the part-owner of one of these clubs, The Living Room, came up to me and was like, "Are you writing these things down, little girl?" I'm just sitting there with a beer after shows, feeling that guilt of lack of discipline and "Yeah, I should be writing these things down. I should, I should be."

I felt the duty to the music, but I just didn't have the discipline, so I was just making it OK by writing another seven songs or whatever. But really, it hurt to know that I'd lost the songs. I've lost dozens of songs, and it still hurts me to know that. It never goes away. It's so stupid, it's not even funny. But I really didn't have any way of recording it. I was done with school, I didn't know anybody in the music industry, didn't know anybody except a couple of friends that were struggling the same way I was. And [the club owner] had a postproduction studio and just like had a little Yamaha upright in there that he's had since he was a teenager. He said, "Come in and we'll record whatever songs you have every year on Christmas," 'cause we were both Jews, you know. And playing these Two-Jews-on-Christmas sessions, he probably has 80 of my songs in his computer somewhere. I feel more at peace knowing they're there, but still, now, even these times, when I'm on a label, I'll write something and I won't be near any recording thing and I'm away, and he's not at the studio -- I get back to New York and I've forgotten. So the second record, "Songs," was just taking 12 from the 40 or whatever I recorded that day, one take each. It's a record in the truest sense, but it's not an intentional recording. The records that I had made were never the records that I would have made if I had time or money or resources or a chance, you know? They were, like, necessity records. It's like, if all you have in the house is peanut butter and stale bread, that's what you're gonna make from. You know? If you get a ton of other stuff and you choose to just have the peanut butter and the bread, that's a whole other thing. And that's like if I was to make my next record just a piano record. And still, that would be different, you know?

'Cause you'd be, then, putting borders around this opportunity that you have to do whatever you want.

Yeah. And there's something to that. You know, when you hear a record like "The Intimate Ella," or something, and it's just her and the pianist, that's a special thing that she chose to do. She chose those songs, and she was in a certain mood, and it sounds a certain way, and it's beautiful, but it's not because she couldn't have a big band behind her.

Do you find that the ability to write songs and forget them and not write them down, not make sure they're gonna be retrievable tomorrow -- is that just how you do it, and you have no other choice? Or does it reflect something about how you feel about your abilities? I'm not psychoanalyzing, but is it a confidence thing?

It's a stupidity thing. It really is. And now, after a few years, it's just sinking in. I've had friends give me little Dictaphones as presents, you know? And I have used them, and they're there. I'll go through it sometimes, and find weird little singing melodies that are stupid. I don't know what they go to or anything. And then there's like a little part where I played something and pressed record and it left my mind, and just by hearing it again, it's there, and I can continue to work. But it really is a stupidity thing, when you just write a song, you're just so sure that you'll never forget it, 'cause it's just so there in your mind and it's so obvious, and you're just like, "But how could I ever forget this? I've just walked around for two days straight and at all times, whether somebody's talking to me or not, I hear it playing in my head over and over. It's on a loop. How am I gonna forget it?" But, when you say that to yourself for the 17th time in a row, when the other 16 you've said the same thing, that's just dumb. I mean, I have this dumb streak. And I don't know if it's stubborn or dumb -- I mean, I bet I could get to the root of it ... if I really wanted to.

It's best not to dig too deep sometimes.

Yeah, 'cause I -- maybe it's just laziness. I know that I try, now, to not do that so much. The way that I found for it to be safe is actually if I just write it and sing it once at a live show, there's always somebody there who records it. It comforts me to know it's somewhere, and it makes me really anxious to know it's nowhere. It's like that thing of, you just wrote a song and you feel so happy to have the privilege of having done that, and then you're walking down the street, and you're just like, "God, I hope I don't get hit by a cab right now. I just want to play it at least once for somebody." You know?

Your music goes from silly to severe with unusual ease. Do you have a clear guiding aesthetic to your body of songs, or is it just like some songs you want it to be one way, and sometimes you want it to be another?

Nah. I mean, yeah. I've always loved, like, voices and accents and different aesthetics ... it's not committed to anything. Like one day, I'm all about Picasso, and then the next, it's all about Cézanne, and the next, it's Botticelli. You know, some people love art deco, they love classical. And it's like, today, I want one; tomorrow, I want the other. You know, the next day, all I wanna listen to is Johnny Cash, and all I wanna listen to is Schubert. It's not like, "I'm really into punk music from blah-blah-blah to blah-blah-blah," you know?