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. He was such an audiophile and also such a lover of Western music and especially anything rock.”
“My dad,” she says, “had this incredible collection that he had amassed. 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. 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. 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. Today, the 42-year-old songwriting virtuoso says that her earliest musical memories involved a grandiose concept. Spektor was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union on February 18, 1980. Whenever I listen to really great songs, I end up going somewhere, and when the song ends, I come back.”
When you add lyrics to that, then that feeling ends up transporting you. “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. Instead, the music continued its flow, as much a transport somewhere as a product of work. She wondered if she’d ever be able to use her right hand again. She even once wrote a song-“Left Hand Song”-using only her left hand because her right hand was going through a condition. Distilling her thoughts is her best gift and a chance at understanding the world. Instead, she says, she’s best used as an explorer, both outward and inward. She explains that she doesn’t believe her perception of reality is accurate. “If I was to write a memoir, all of it would be made up in some way,” Spektor says. Others work as journalists and scientists. For her, her “happy place” is fiction and her imagination. But they’re all autobiographical in that my real emotions and real feelings are in them. I don’t write autobiographical songs in that direct way. “My system is such that I could be going through something emotional,” Spektor says, “but I’ll write a funny song. It marks her latest marvelous and gut-wrenching chapter. Now, though, Spektor has a new album out in the world: Home, before and after, which dropped on June 24. For example, her beloved musical father passed away earlier this year. Spektor, who moved to the United States at the age of 9, has often known a tough day. In fact, it’s been tumultuous since her birth abroad in the censorship-rich country of Russia. But that doesn’t mean her life has been boring. For Spektor, it’s about the feeling of a work rather than its adherence to real-life detail. 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. Reality for the standout is often merely a jumping-off point for her relentless imagination. If songwriter and performer Regina Spektor was ever to write a memoir, she says it would probably be fiction.
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