Musicians - Regina Spektor

Home > Listing Index > Musicians > Regina Spektor

	Musicians - Regina Spektor

Regina Spektor is a singer-songwriter and pianist. Born in Moscow in 1980, she moved with her family to the Bronx, New York, at age nine. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centering around New York City's East Village.

Early life

Spektor comes from a musical family; her father, a photographer, was also an amateur violinist and her mother was a music professor in a Russian conservatory (she now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York). The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, during the period of Perestroika when Jewish citizens were first permitted to emigrate. Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, they finally settled in the Bronx, New York.

In Russia, Spektor studied classical piano from the age of six, and was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as the The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in Russia.

Beginnings as a songwriter

In New York, Spektor gained a firm grounding in classical music from her piano teacher, Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music. Although she had always made up songs around the house, Spektor first became interested in songwriting during a visit to Israel during her teenage years. Attracting attention from the other children on the trip for the songs she made up while hiking, she realized she had an aptitude for songwriting. Following this trip, she was first exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, and other singer-songwriters, which gave her the idea that she could create her own songs.

She attended Purchase College in Purchase, New York, graduating in 2001. She gradually achieved notice through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, most importantly at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe.

Style

Spektor's idiosyncratic songs generally take the form of character studies, and are thus much like short stories in song. She states that she has written hundreds of songs, but that she rarely writes any of them down. Unlike the work of many singer-songwriters, they are not usually autobiographical, but based on scenarios drawn from her imagination. They range from playful to introspective in character, showing influences from classical, folk, Russian music, and hip hop. Her earliest work also shows the influence of jazz and blues. She has stated that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole.

Spektor also explores the various timbres of her voice, including a breathy, angelic high register and a Billie Holiday-like lower register that she often allows to break into a trumpet-like tone quality. She often uses a jazzy vibrato and sliding tones in her voice's middle register. She also uses a variety of rather unorthodox techniques, such as verses composed entirely of vibrating noises made with the lips, beatbox-style flourishes in the middle of ballads, or the use of a drum stick to tap rhythms on the body of the piano, or a chair.

Her lyrics (which she usually sings in English, though sometimes including a few words of French or Russian, and the occasional verse of Latin) are equally eclectic, frequently drawing on unusual intellectual and literary references, (such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in "Poor Little Rich Boy," The Little Prince in "Baobabs," and Boris Pasternak in "Après moi le deluge"), further setting her music apart from mainstream folk music. Many of her songs are narrative, use a mixture of styles and techniques, and often start with a seemingly simple piano riff. She uses a strong New York accent on some words, which she states is due to her love of New York and its culture.

Performances

Since c. 2005, Spektor has performed on a bright red Baldwin baby grand piano. She opened for The Strokes in 2003, on her first North American tour. Subsequently, she appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Last Call with Carson Daly and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and toured the United States and Europe. Although she generally only performs original material, she performed her first covers in 2005, of songs by Leonard Cohen and Madonna for a Jewish music festival in New York City.

Discography

2001 - 11:11 (Regina Spektor)
2002 - Songs (Regina Spektor)
2004 - Soviet Kitsch (Sire/London/Rhino)
2005 - Live at Bull Moose EP (Sire)
2006 - Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories (Transgressive)

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Regina Spektor ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Regina Spektor; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.