Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
She was a Russian-born immigrant who became a Grammy-caliber singer-songwriter in America.
This Thursday night, Regina Spektor plays Wolf Trap in Virginia with a heavy heart for back home.
“This horrendous War in Ukraine has been breaking all our hearts,” Spektor told WTOP. “It’s really hard for me to believe because, when I was leaving the Soviet Union, it really felt like things were going to turn around and there would be this incredible awakening and there was going to be a shift of freedom and a chance. But the idea that it’s actually clamped down and is much less free and much scarier than when I left is very hard for me to understand.”
Born in Moscow in 1980, Spektor moved with her family moved to The Bronx neighborhood of New York in 1989 — the same year that the Berlin Wall fell — and she worried that the move would interrupt her Russian classical piano training.
“I started playing piano when I was 6,” Spektor said. “We ended up leaving in 1989 and came to the United States as refugees during Perestroika. It was still [the] Soviet Union. Then I started believing that I wouldn’t get to study anymore, but luckily my dad met an incredible, generous man on the subway who happened to be a violinist and his wife was a pianist. They proceeded to gift me my music education, so good people make the world go round.”
Spektor played the New York indie scene and self-released three albums, namely the cult classic “Soviet Kitsch” (2003), featuring the cool song “Us”, which appeared on the movie soundtrack for “(500) Days of Summer” (2009).
“I didn’t have any money for any kind of budgets to make records, everything was self-made and self-released,” Spektor said. “I just loved playing around and experimenting. I needed these other sounds, so I would just play with what I had. Maybe one song; it was a drumstick on a chair. I figured out how to do that on a song on ‘Soviet Kitsch.'”
After signing with Sire Records, she released her fourth album, “Begin to Hope” (2004), featuring songs that would make their way onto hit TV shows. “On the Radio” appeared in “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Samson” played in “CSI: NY,” “Better” was featured on “How I Met Your Mother” and “Fidelity” was in “Veronica Mars.” The lattermost tune is still burned into our brains with how Spektor sings the word “heart” in a broken-up staccato: “hea-a-a-a-a-rt.”
“It was just me implying other instruments,” Spektor said. “I think that because I came from playing music by myself and I heard so many different instruments that I had no access to … I would just try to get as much as I could out of the piano and my voice — and that’s probably where all the sound-making came from.”
In 2006, Showtime’s “Weeds” invited Spektor to sing one of the many renditions of the title song “Little Boxes,” while her Grammy-nominated tune “You’ve Got Time” was written specifically as the theme of Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” (2013-2019). Both series were created by Jenji Kohan, who has since become a good friend.
“When it came time for ‘Orange,’ Jenji reached out to me,” Spektor said. “We met in a cafe in Manhattan and she told me some of the stories of the show. As she was telling it to me, I just started hearing things in my head. … I went on tour and they kept sending me little episodes that weren’t even finished, and I got so hooked on waiting for those episodes to come in my inbox. I just fell in love with the show so purely and the music came really fast.”
Arguably the best use of one of Spector’s songs in a TV show came from her fifth album, “Far” (2009), when HBO’s “The Leftovers” used her song “Laughing With” with its goosebump-inducing lyrics: “No one laughs at God in a hospital, no one laughs at God in a war, no one’s laughing at God when they’re starving or freezing or so very poor.”
“To me, writing a song and then having somebody write an episode because they were inspired by a song, or somebody envisioning how to use a song that you wrote in a scene of a film or a television show, it’s one of the greatest gifts,” Spektor said. “What a musician wants most in the world is for whatever they made to be useful to someone. To have other art come out of it is just so extra special. I love when these songs get used.”
Her sixth album, “What We Saw from the Cheap Seats” (2011), featured the song “All the Rowboats,” which was nominated at MTV’s Video Music Awards. She followed up with her seventh album “Remember Us to Life” (2016) the same year that she covered George Harrison’s iconic Beatles tune “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” for the excellent stop-motion animated film “Kubo and the Two Strings” (2016), which was nominated for two Oscars.
After all of her musical contributions to the screen, what does she think of the current double strike by the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild that is shutting down Hollywood for the foreseeable future?
“I just think that all these writers and all these actors work so hard and what they give is so much that we really do need to stand in solidarity with them,” Spektor said. “It makes me really sick that there are people who are CEOs at these huge studios who are sitting and collecting these multi-million-dollar paychecks every year saying, ‘Well, let’s just wait and see the writers get evicted. Let’s starve them out.’ That’s not the American way.”
Her newest album, “Home, Before & After” (2022), was due to start recording on April 1, 2020 (she jokes, “Nothing huge changed, right?”), but it was delayed when the COVID-19 pandemic gutted New York City. While certain song titles sound inspired by the pandemic, namely “Becoming All Alone,” Spektor says the seeds of “Home, Before & After” were actually planted long before the pandemic as she grappled with her own immigrant story.
Coming full circle to Russia’s War in Ukraine, she warns it’s a cautionary tale for her fellow Americans.
“How does something like that happen?” Spector said. “The feeling that I walk away from it all with is that you just have to be vigilant and you have to really be kind and gentle in your life and remember that your neighbors are [human beings], to be kind and accepting of people because these things shift on a dime. People are always ready to use scare tactics and vilify other people and, through that, wage war and enslave entire huge nations.”
Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
