Regina Spektor doesn't know anyone else who sounds like her. That's good, as familiarity breeds indifference, she tells Tony Clayton-Lea
There's weird, there's very strange, and there's Regina Spektor. We've been here before, in the territory of the wilfully, disarmingly out-there - Björk immediately springs to mind, with Kate Bush and Tori Amos arriving shortly after. Russian-born Bronx resident Spektor, however, takes the proverbial biscuit with her decidedly odd musical configurations, her scattershot approach to tunes and her head-scratching lyrics.
Spektor has been around and about the NYC music scene for several years. She started hanging out with New York's anti-folk brigade in the late 1990s, a time when the likes of The Moldy Peaches and Jeffrey Lewis were intent on squeezing the melodies out of folk music and inserting instead a much-needed measure of atonal, surreal irreverence. The so-called anti-folk scene, however, soon fizzled out; there was only so much nursery rhyme nonsense and self-conscious streams of gibberish - not to mention the marked absence of tunes - that people could take. These days, its participants have realised that it's good to have the occasional literate rhyming couplet and a smattering of melody. Yet the scene's very awkwardness is what attracted people such as Spektor in the first place.
"You know how it is with these things," says Spektor, before embarking on her debut European tour, which sees her play Ireland for the first time next Thursday. "The people that are in it are in it quite naturally, and then the people that write about it come up with a name for it. To the people involved, it was just a different type of music played in certain New York venues that was liked by a certain amount of people. We went to each other's shows, and maybe had the attitude of doing whatever we wanted, not really caring as to whether other people liked it. We weren't out to win over fans, or please casual observers, or fit into any sort of formula or image. And that stance unified us - but there wasn't really a definite sound. It's hard to know about things that start off in a very organic way - whether they stall or snowball."
Anti-folk isn't really anti-folk, however, when it transmogrifies into an accepted norm, which is where Spektor's apparent unorthodoxy enters the frame. I say to her that her most recent album, Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories (a compilation that is her introductory calling card for European audiences), is the kind of record that will divide opinion as to its, er, innate qualities. In other words, it's a bit consciously kooky, isn't it?
"No," she objects in a slightly worn tone that confirms she has heard this before. "I operate pretty much within the form and structure of popular song writing. There's so much music out there and so much of it is different - everything from John Cage and Mozart to Nirvana - so for anyone to say my music is strange would be wrong, and for me to say my music is unorthodox would come across as being conceited."
Do her friends not occasionally whisper to her that she should tone down the temperamental-child- playing-piano antics? The classically trained singer replies that she only hangs out with people who like her music.
"But I understand that some people might not like what I do," she says. "I wouldn't expect anything other than that, because there are so many different tastes, even among those with a similar background to me. There is always going to be music we don't understand.
"People think something that sells a lot is really universal or is liked by a lot of people, but that's not necessarily the case. It's just that people get used to things. We're living in a time where things are being assimilated too quickly. When you watch a music television station and see some of the videos on it, some are absolutely atrocious and you wonder who might be into them. I think that no one is into them, but they're being bought and paid for, and are being played a certain amount of times until they become familiar.
"Once something is familiar you can mistakenly think you like it because it becomes a comfort thing. That same song comes on for the 17th time that day; you've heard it in the supermarket, the car radio, the television, and so on. By the end of the day you're humming what is a meaningless tune, and you're under the impression you like it. No one looks up to the heavens and says - apropos of my own music - what in the name of God is that?"
SPEKTOR SAYS SHE doesn't know of anyone else who sounds like her. But isn't it impossible to be objective? Yes, she says, but not to have moments of detachment.
"When I have moments of complete detachment I'm aware of things, such as I write what I write the way I write because that's how it has to be written," she says. "And then it's done, and I move on to the next thing, and then I write that the way it has to be written."
Does she always like what she writes? Not necessarily, she remarks, it just has to be done because it's part of her creative working process. As time goes by she goes from disliking to liking to loving her work.
"I obviously very strongly believe in what I do, because I wouldn't be travelling around the world bringing the music to people," she says. "What would be the point of bringing nothingness to people? They have lives and work and problems and kids and lovers, so they don't need me to bring mediocre stuff to them. I'm doing it because I think it could be good, or even meaningful to them. The bottom line is that I tried."
Regina Spektor plays Whelan's, Dublin, on Thur, Feb 9. Her album, Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories, is on Transgressive Records