The captivating performer is sharing moments that are both intimate and grand – piano, that is – with her fans.
When singer-songwriter Regina Spektor performs at SummerStage in New York City’s Central Park on August 24, and then at WHBPAC in West Hampton on August 25, she’ll be doing it in style, playing a top-of-the-line Steinway piano. “I think it’s kind of an incredible luxury,” she says, then giddily adds, “The case for the piano is bigger than my first apartment!”
She’s upbeat as she calls from the middle of a quick vacation she and her family are taking in between her shows. Unlike previous tours, when she brought along a full band, this time it really will be just her and that Steinway onstage – and, she’s clearly relieved to report, it’s been going very well.
She admits there was a moment when she feared it would not: “I actually had almost like a mental meltdown right before I played the Greek [Theatre],” she says. “Maybe like an hour-and-a-half before it, I was like, ‘What am I doing? Is this crazy to just play solo piano shows that are large and outdoors?’” Fortunately, that show turned out to be “magical. It was just so fun and funny and loving.”
That experience reminded her that there are certain things that only happen when she’s by herself onstage. “I’m completely free, where I can change a set list on a dime. I could hear somebody call out a song, and if that’s something that I’d been practicing or resonates, I could just [play] that. I could shape time however I want.”
Her setlists are drawn from across her entire career, including songs from her most recent album, Home, before and after, which came out last year. She feels gratified that audiences have clearly embraced this new material, instead of only clinging to her more familiar work: “There’s been excitement and singing along to those songs, too, which is very, very wonderful, of course, as a person performing them.
“There are audiences out in the world that just want to hear what they know, but I definitely have experienced, at least from my audience, that they’re such a listening, caring audience,” she continues. “I hear that from a lot of people who have opened the show: ‘Your audience is so amazing!’ I’m like, ‘I know! I love them so much!’ It feels like an honor to play to people that are that into music and that open-minded. I feel fearless because of that, because I feel like I could just be very free.”
Spektor has been endearing to listeners around the world since her fourth album, 2006’s Begin to Hope. It was a breakthrough hit for her, achieving Gold status in the U.S. and charting in several other countries. Some of her songs have become international hits, including “Us,” “On the Radio,” “Fidelity,” and “Samson.” So far, she has released eight studio albums, earning acclaim for her masterful melodic sensibilities and quirky lyrics.
“I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing things,” she says. “Not on the musical level, and not on the lyrical level. Because I just feel like all of that is for other people. Like, if they want to get deep in it and look at, ‘Her themes are this.’ But I cannot see any benefit, to me, to be looking [at my music] in that way.”
However, Spektor will say that she views each of her compositions as “a little key to a specific room: each song is kind of its own little place. I think of music as almost like time travel because you get to go on this trip, and only that song will take you there.”
At first, there was little indication that she’d become a celebrated singer-songwriter. Born and raised in Moscow, Russia, she and her family emigrated to the Bronx in New York City when she was nine years old. Both of her parents were talented classical musicians and she initially believed she’d follow in their footsteps.
She was a talented classical pianist, but she eventually realized she didn’t have what it would take to succeed in that realm. She likens being a classical musician to training for the Olympics, where only a very select few can succeed.
“There’s a certain moment where you have to get to that next level – you have to have such endurance and such abilities. A person could love the Olympics, but if they start running and get a pain in their side and start walking, they’re not going to get to the Olympics,” she says. In that same way, “Classical musicians are supposed to be able to practice for eight hours a day and love it, and I kept waiting for that to kick in when I was a teenager – and I was never able to break that three hour barrier. It was a very painful realization for me, actually, because music was the only thing I could really see myself doing.”
It never occurred to her to try again with a different style of music “because maybe I’m stupid, I don’t know. And I didn’t really grow up studying singing – I only sang in the shower.” Her music dreams seemed over – but then, as she puts it, “a wonderful convergence of events led me to trying to write songs – and that, I could work on 10 hours in a row.”
That “convergence of events” occurred when, at 16 years old, she won an arts scholarship to go to Israel for the summer. There, she was thrilled to find herself surrounded by other creative kids. However, other parts of the trip, such as hiking in the sweltering Negev Desert, were distinctly not to her liking.
“I was so not sporty,” she says with a laugh. “It was very, very difficult for me, and I kind of felt like I was dying. I didn’t realize, but other kids told me that I was always singing to myself. I think I was doing it for survival. So these kids would be like, ‘I really liked that one song you made up.’ They would all try and hike next to me because they liked listening. At the end of the trip, when I was about to go home, they were like, ‘You’re making up real songs. You should try and learn an instrument so you could maybe try and write some songs.’”
But, of course, Spektor already did know an instrument – the piano. She immediately realized she had all the skills she needed to become a singer-songwriter, and she soon became a fixture in New York’s edgy East Village music scene. She self-released her first two albums, 11:11 and Songs, in 2001 and 2002, respectively, which led to a record deal with a major label. That allowed her third album, 2004’s Soviet Kitsch, to get wide distribution, which in turn helped her begin building the momentum that would culminate in her commercial breakthrough.
This summer, as Spektor crisscrosses the world playing songs from across her career, she’s touched that audiences are still so willing to come and listen to her sing and play her Steinway. “I never take it for granted because I do know what it feels like to play to people that are not listening, or are waiting for the main act, if you’re opening,” she says. “Never did I ever dream it would be this incredible. How lucky!”
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