Regina Spektor is getting quite a bit of attention of late and it’s all well deserved and wonderful. She has a great story and I thought you might like to hear what her Wiki says:
Spektor was born in Moscow, USSR to a musical Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, is a photographer and amateur violinist.
Her mother, Bella Spektor, was a music professor in a Russian college
of music and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.[1]Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather.[2] She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll 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.[1] The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Regina had to leave her piano behind.[3]
The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not
leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the
ethnic and political discrimination which Jews faced.[4]Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the family settled in the Bronx, New York, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a Jewish day middle school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She then attended high school for two years at the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, but transferred to a public school, Fair Lawn High School, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last two years of her high school education.[2][5]
By now y’all know I love my quirky pianists. Spektor is most certainly the quirkiest and most eclectic girl in the music industry that I know of. Not to mention wildly talented as well being a lovely vocalist who doesn’t have to dress up in outrageous costumes or make the tabloids for attention. Her music speaks for itself.
Her 2006 album Begin To Hope is superfantastic. Here’s “Fidelity” from that album.
I went back and forth over whether to share this next song with you or not. “Samson” is a jewel. It’s my favorite song of the past few years (period) and it’s one that can make me cry and I strangely identify with and just adore it. I play it often. “You are my sweetest downfall/I loved you first/Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth” just kills me. You’ll have to hear it, but I think “you are my sweetest downfall” may be the most poetic phrase I’ve heard in years. The “beneath the sheets of paper” part reminds me of my unpublished novel (sigh). So, that’s my song. Maybe you’ll like it too.
Spektor’s latest album, Far is out now and the current single is “Eet.” It’s lovely.
And the perfect song to listen to after “Eet” is “Dance Anthem of the 80’s” for the -eet sounds. Here’s a fabulous live clip.
So, that’s my Regina Spektor post. I hope y’all enjoyed it as much as enjoy her music.
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