Regina Spektor
Regina Spektor
Regina Ilyinichna Spektor is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She was born in the Soviet Union where she began classical training on the piano at the age of 6. When she was 9 years old, her family emigrated to the United States where she continued her classical training into her teenage years; she began to write original songs shortly thereafter...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth18 February 1980
CityMoscow, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
I just like being all over the place and writing whatever comes to mind. Having the tools? It's such a gift.
If somebody wanted to go and find songs of mine to fill an iPod, that aren't on any records. They could probably find dozens of songs besides the ones that are on records.
Maybe I am skipping over the city and going from very personal things to the world, from internal experience to giant, far-away-from-space experience.
We’re trying to be faithful but we’re cheating, cheating, cheating
No one's laughing at God -We're all laughing with God.
You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.
It feels very good to sing in Russian. It feels so good inside my body.
It's a privilege to work with an artist that you really care for.
I have this obsession with the '80s because I missed all of it.
I'm like, 'Would you be the person in the room that would boo when Dylan went electric? I know I wouldn't. Or are you the person that left The Beatles after 'She Loves You,' or 'Drive My Car?' You weren't on board for 'Revolution 9' or 'Day In The Life,' were you?
Tomorrow you might get a phone call about something wonderful and you might get a phone call about something terrible.
I also don't like to make really big records, because I feel then that the songs don't get enough space to be themselves, so I would never want to make a record that's like seventeen songs.
I spent the '80s in the Soviet Union and when I came to America it was '89 and I was in an immigrant bubble and we didn't have MTV or cable, so I kind of discovered the '80s when I was already older, maybe in college. And I continued to have this romantic obsession with all those films and there's this sound I hear in my head and it's kind of this bittersweet romantic, dark sound.
You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.