The death of a parent changes you in ways you never imagined, says Regina Spektor. Three months after her father died, the American-Russian songwriter is still processing the loss, even as she prepares to release her first album since 2016. Her emotions are a jumble. One thing she knows for sure: the person she used to be has left, never to return.
“I feel altered. More than anything with the loss of my dad, I feel like I’m a new person,” says Spektor (42) from the New York apartment she shares with her husband, the musician Jack Dishel, and their eight year-old son. “I don’t know her that well yet. She’s here to stay. Everything is different. It’s like the colours of the world turned a little bit different.”
Her new record, Home, Before and After, was already finished when Ilya Spektor, a photographer and amateur violinist, passed away in early April (his daughter was due to play her first big post-pandemic show, at Carnegie Hall that week). Yet it’s hard not to think of Spektor’s grief listening to new songs such as Becoming All Alone and Up a Mountain. Suffused in sadness, they speak to the pain — but even more so the confusion — bound up in bereavement.
This is an LP that spins you around, leaving you breathless, perhaps exhilarated — and maybe disoriented too. These qualities also make Home, Before and After a classic “Covid album” (rapidly becoming a genre unto itself). And yet, once again your ears deceive you — in the same way that they prefigured her father’s death, the tracks were written and ready to be put down on tape long before the pandemic turned the world upside down.
“I was scheduled to start recording the record April 1st, 2020,” says Spektor in her flinty New York accent (think Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll meets Joey from Friends). “But things really do make sense and fit in this strange way.”
She wonders if the “lockdown” feel of the project — and it’s something that keeps coming up in interviews — flows from our desire to assign meaning to art; to bring our own experience to a blank canvas; to impose order on abstraction.
“Or maybe it has to do with the fact that everything is imbued with meaning already,” she says. “That’s the big mystery: do we find meaning that’s there? Or are we projecting it on to where there isn’t any? I don’t know. At least to me, a lot of [the new album] made sense during this crazy time.”
With a string of top five albums and three million monthly streams on Spotify, Spektor is far too successful to be thought of as a cult artist. However, her music nonetheless has the aspect of a secret shared between friends, and fans are ferocious in their devotion. Some have been with her since the start (her first Irish show was in February 2006, when she packed Whelan’s in Dublin).
Others discovered Spektor when her single Hotel Song turned up on a mobile phone ad in 2007. Still more got on board after Orange Is the New Black showrunner Jenji Kohan commissioned Spektor to write the Netflix’s series’s theme: a bristling stomper called You’ve Got Time. Kohan isn’t her only famous admirer. The fan club also includes Peter Gabriel (who covered her tune Après Moi), Neil Gaiman (“she’s a wonder”) and Hamilton’s Lin Manuel Miranda (he declared her “a genius”).
For those yet to tune in to Spektor’s distinctive confessional pop, Home, Before and After makes for a perfect entry point. It is Spektor at her most grippingly introspective. Her expressive voice is paired with brittle piano, stormy orchestral arrangements and even the shuffling of a tap-dancer. It’s wonderfully rococo, like an Edward Gorey sketch or a verse of Emily Dickinson.
There is also a lot of darkness knitted into her writing. “In the garden, there’s a flower,” Spektor sings on her ominous single Up the Mountain. It’s a retelling of Adam and Eve, which casts humanity as naively foolish in its rush to consume everything it touches (here, the serpent is our insatiable greed).
The lyrics could be a metaphor for climate change. Or for the loss of innocence. The trick with Spektor’s music is that it never quite comes with a roadmap. And while you can bring your own perspective, there, at the very centre, a mystery lingers.
But if her material is melodramatic and otherworldly, her life story is altogether grittier. She was born in Moscow in 1980 to a Russian-Jewish family. With anti-Semitism rife, they moved to the United States when she was nine, and she grew up largely in the Bronx.
Classically trained in Russia and at State University in New York, in her teens Spektor discovered punk and rap and became involved in the “anti-folk” scene that bubbled up in Greenwich Village. Oozing out of coffeeshops and under-age shows, anti-folk was a springboard for her husband Dishel’s outfit, The Moldy Peaches, who mixed comedy with a cultivated tweeness, and for Jeffrey Lewis, who gold-panned for truth in childlike naivety (one of his songs begins, “Back when I was four and I knew the name of every dinosaur”).
Spektor had cut her teeth at ground zero for anti-folk, the East Village’s SideWalk cafe (which closed in 2019). And yet she quickly left the movement behind. With financial backing from her parents, in 2001 she self-released her debut album, 11:11 (a delayed anniversary vinyl reissue is due later in 2022). Its influences transcended anti-folk, drawing on jazz, hip hop, Kurt Weill and the Jewish klezmer music she grew up listening to in Moscow.
She has extended family from all over the Soviet Union: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. And she is obviously horrified by Putin’s invasion, her heart breaking for Ukraine. She has also spoken out against boycotts of individual Russian artists, feeling that to target them is unfair.
The comparison she offers is the US’s war in Iraq. As an American citizen, she was often upbraided about George W Bush while touring internationally. And she had gone out and protested against the conflict. Yet there was ultimately nothing she could do as an individual to stop the tanks rolling in. In the case of Russians, who can’t even speak out, the idea that they could meaningfully oppose Putin is absurd.
“In general, I’m against cultural bans. I think they’re a terrible thing to do,” she says. “In a lot of ways, part of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain coming down and the Soviet regime falling apart, was culture seeping in and connecting. It was music and arts. And people being like, ‘this is not a land of bogeyman’. These labels: ‘Communist’. This or that. It dehumanises people.
“This whole idea of broad strokes — there is no ‘the Russians’. There are different people in different states of health, or education or socio-economics. And different states of being, informed or misinformed. It’s no different than the United States. It’s not like, ‘the Russian is a brute, they will kill’. We [in the West] live in a free country. We don’t have our opposition leaders murdered. We don’t have our journalists thrown out of windows or poisoned. We don’t have to go jail if we protest in the street.
And their jail is not like our jail. “It’s Russian jail. Look at the wars we went to. Look at how misinformed we got. We have real elections. We don’t have half of the propaganda that they have. And we’re misinformed, and we’re about to lose women’s rights [with access to abortion under attack across the US]. We have an absolutely insane situation with violence in schools.”
Spektor, for all her success, has never slotted comfortably into contemporary pop. Her antecedents are through-the-looking glass songwriters such as Tori Amos and Kate Bush (who, as with Spektor, has received a boost from Netflix). And, just like those female artists with a singular vision, she was labelled “kooky” and “quirky”.
She isn’t a stranger to eccentricity, it is true. Playing that first Irish show in Whelan’s in February 2006, for instance, the centrepiece was Poor Little Rich Boy, a gothic curlicue that featured Spektor belting out a drumbeat with a detached table leg.
Spektor did so whilst singing in a haunting register, “Poor little rich boy, all the world is okay / The water runs off your skin and down into the drain”. The track is rumoured to be about Julian Casablancas from the Strokes, who would later invite Spektor to tour with his band.
It was glorious. But strange too. And yet that unorthodox streak lives side by side with songs of devastating sincerity. Just listen to her early quasi-hit Us, the sound of a heart ripped in two in slow motion. So she has always meant it, absolutely and from the bottom of her soul. Does it hurt her feelings to then hear herself described as wacky or weird?
“I had a real minute there. I’m putting all of my heart, all my emotion into this music. I was upset. Then later, I was like, ‘you know what ... I am f***ing weird’. I’m normal to myself, because I’m me. They’re not wrong. I do see the world sometimes in strange ways. I’m probably stranger than I myself realise. In moments, when I catch glimpses of what other people might be responding to ... I can kind of see it. I was like, ‘well, you know ... I am eccentric. I am little bit crazy, if not a lot.’ It’s fine.”
Home, Before and After is released on June 24th
