Regina Spektor was born in Moscow, to a musical Jewish family. Her father is a photographer and amateur violinist.
Her mother was a music professor in a Russian college of music. Regina learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof (an antique upright piano) that was given to her mother by her grandfather.
Regina Spektor Early Influences
She was also exposed to the music of classic rock bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union.
Regina's works resembles a collection of different sounds of stories and styles, taking things other people have discarded or forgotten about and using them, shaping them into art.
Her family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate elsewhere. Regina had to leave her beloved piano behind.
The seriousness of her piano talent almost made her parents consider not leaving the Soviet Union but they finally decided to leave, due to the ethnic and political discrimination which Jews faced. Her family finally settled in the Bronx, New York, after moving to various places including music-and-culture-rich Italy.
Although the family had been unable to bring her piano from Russia, Regina found a piano on which to play in the basement of her synagogue, and also practiced on tabletops and other hard surfaces. She has transformed this style into her own unique style, sometimes using her own body as a musical instrument.
Regina Spektor Music & Lyrics
It's her eclectic mix of writing styles that draws the listener in. Her songwriting has social political quality to it, as well as strong literary influence. In her songs one can hear verses of poetry borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood, Ezra Pound and Shakesperare, as well as from classic texts like Greek myths and a few Bible references, especially Jewish ones. Each song has its own style and is unique to itself, so it's hard to pin down a definitive style for her work as a whole.
Regina's songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination. Not many people would be able to pull of highs and lows, reverberations, repetitions and the way her mouth moves around the words as if she wants to make sure the audience is hearing everything she says.
She sings like she doesn't want the audience to miss a moment, as if she's singing and performing all these stories in her songs just for them, and them alone. Her songs are stories, not just a poem set to music.
Wasteside
Wasteside is a song which refers to the classic satirical Soviet novel The Twelve Chairs, which describes a town in which people are born, get their hair cut and are sent to the cemetery: "All the people in my town would be born/They'd get themselves a little haircut/then promptly after they'd be dead." Death is a common theme in her songs, with many variations of social commentary (as in Wasteland), as well as anger and acceptance.
The songs are so open that they seem to change each time it is listened to. The listener may hear a particular tone or inflection that was missed the first time around and it changes of the meaning of the song the next time it is listened to. For this reason these songs never get tired or old.
Regina Spektor Concerts
She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, most importantly at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe, but also at the Living Room, Tonic, Fez, the Knitting Factory, and CB's Gallery.
She sold self-produced CDs at her performances during this period between 2001-2002. Her latest album, Begin to Hope, is available wherever music is sold.
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