Yahoo Lifestyle Regina Spektor Is Going Back to Where It All Began
Regina Spektor’s album Songs has, for over twenty years, existed as something of a musical curio that only a handful of prudent fans have been lucky enough to enjoy. Self-released in 2002, its 12 tracks were harvested from a selection of some 40 songs that Spektor, who was born in Russia to a Jewish family, had recorded on Christmas Day in 2001 for the sole purpose of remembering them (her songwriting output was so prolific that she’d forget melodies and verses she’d written the week prior).
At that time, Spektor was a burgeoning anti-folk artist whose bright, narrative lyrics and solo piano accompaniments were a far cry from the post-punk music that was dominating New York's downtown scene. A regular at open mic nights across the Lower East Side, Spektor sold Songs, which she burned onto CDs at her parents’ house, for $10 out of her backpack after shows to anyone who wanted to hear more of her idiosyncratic sound. In late 2002, after impressing a well-connected music producer at one of her gigs, Spektor was tapped to open for The Strokes on their 2003–2004 Room on Fire tour. A deal with Sire Records followed, as did her breakout album, 2004's Soviet Kitsch, and 2006’s even buzzier Begin to Hope (it’s single “Fidelity” remains one of Spektor’s most popular songs), and Songs disappeared into increasingly obsolete home CD collections. Only two of its tracks, “Samson” and “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” were ever rerecorded and included on formal albums.
But on November 29, Songs will begin a second life. Spektor is releasing the album on both vinyl and streaming platforms for the first time, mastered, also for the very first time, by Bob Ludwig (who has previously worked with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Queen, and Daft Punk). To celebrate, Spektor will perform the album live at a run of sold-out shows at Brooklyn’s Warsaw concert venue on December 8, 9, and 10. “I’m going to try and stay as true to the album as I can,” says Spektor. “Who I am now is very, very different; I'm 22 years more into life. But that's kind of the fun part. If you play something all the time, it's fun to change it up, but if you never play something, the change is just you playing it.”
Each show will be slightly unique, supplemented by additional songs from Spektor’s past discography. But what will remain the same across the performances, she hopes, is a sense of togetherness in what feel like exceedingly lonesome times. “It's been a really hard year, and I think that so much of people's energy is going into being reactive and outraged and angry and hurt and feeling powerless,” she explains. “That's where art and shows come into play; people need to keep seeking out community.”
Below, Spektor tells Harper’s Bazaar about the genesis of Songs and what it was like returning to it more than two decades on.
What prompted you to formally release Songs now, 22 years after you first assembled it?
The why now is very silly. It's basically because I'm two years too late for the album’s 20th anniversary. People have been asking forever, "Why is it not on Spotify or any streamers? Why can I only listen to it on YouTube?" So, this album is a special thing for all the people who’ve held a torch for these songs for all these years and kept them in their hearts.
When you recorded the tracks on Songs, you never expected them to come together as an album. You were really just recording them in order to have them archived somewhere, right?
A lot of the songs that are on the album were just little songs I either was writing at the end of college or right out of college. My parents let me quit my day job, which was the kindest thing ever, and said, "You can live in your childhood bedroom and make music.” So I moved in with my parents in the Bronx and I was playing any bar or open mic that would have me downtown. For some reason, I was under the impression that I had to have new songs for every show. At some point, my friend Joe Mendelson, who was part owner of the Lower East Side bar The Living Room, mentioned a song I had performed there at a show a few weeks prior. I remembered it existing, but I remembered nothing about it; no melody came back to me. I felt very, very sad that it was erased forever. He said, "I think that you should just practice all the songs that you can remember as much as you can. When it's Christmas and nobody's working in my post-production studio, you'll come in and you'll play them all on my upright piano and we'll record whatever you wrote that year.” We did it two Christmases in a row; it was our mini tradition. We recorded most songs in one take. I had this peace of mind that I could erase them from my mind, and they would be somewhere. Then I got signed and all of the sudden, I was touring and never had as much time to write ever again in my life.
When did you start sharing the album or having people listen to it?
I made my very first record in college, 11:11, but it was super-duper influenced and inspired by jazz and blues, so it was completely different than the songs that I was performing downtown. I would play a show, and somebody would come up to me afterwards and say, "Do you have a CD I can buy?" I'd pull out 11:11 and make this cringe face and say, "I'm so sorry, but this will not sound like anything you heard tonight.” So, I was talking to Joe, and he said, "Well, why don't you just take 12 songs that you recorded with me, and we'll burn a CD?” My friend from college took the photo for the cover—it was very, very, very homemade. That's the only way it lived. And then I didn't listen to it for 20 years.
When you first listened to Songs again in 2022, was there a specific or special moment that any of the tracks brought you back to? Or did it prompt you to reflect on the artist you were then versus
It’s really hard for me to analyze work in that way. I get awash in a lot of overlapping memories. But in general, I'm the kind of person who will watch a poignant story unfold on a city bus and then write a song, and it'll have nothing to do with the story, but it'll have somehow been inspired by it. I don't have a very cause-and-effect artistry. After we had come up with the idea of doing the shows at Warsaw, I started listening to Songs through new ears and was like, "Oh my God, there's so much to learn. I'm going to really have to practice hard." It takes me a while to figure out my own songs if I haven't played them for a long time, and this takes that to a new level. I'm going to really find out what I think and feel about the album because listening is one thing, but having something come out of your fingers and out of your mouth is a whole other experience. I'm very, very curious and excited to see what that feels like.
I have to ask you about “Samson,” of course, because it originally appeared on Songs before it was on Begin to Hope. And I know the original version is a bit different.
The performance of “Samson” on Songs is much, much slower. For years, I was like, "How does anybody even listen to that?" But once, somebody requested the Songs version of Samson at a show, and I realized that they really wanted it at that speed; that's what they were connected to. It started to, in my mind, open up the possibility that particular thing makes sense to people, that different people are at different tempos. Somehow, when I first write a song, it'll oftentimes live at a slower tempo than where it later naturally ends up. So the tempo that I play “Samson” at on Begin to Hope was much more like what it should have been.
Why did "Samson" stick out to you as something you wanted to re-record?
There actually were a few other songs that stayed with me from Songs throughout the years. “Prisoners” was a part of my live set throughout many years, and I re-recorded “Ne Me Quitte Pas” and put it onto What We Saw from the Cheap Seats. But with “Samson,” I think it was really that people kept talking about it. I had this experience at a songwriter’s showcase I did at The Living Room where, when I finished my set, which included “Samson,” two men who were in the music business came over to me and said, "Who wrote that song for you?" I said, "What do you mean? I wrote it." They said, "No, no, you didn't write that song, an older man wrote that song." I remember being so shocked. But it was stuff like that that made me feel like something about that song was meaningful to people. It's kind of nice to get to play the original one again so people can hear how slow and weird it was when I first wrote it.
In revisiting Songs, did you notice a big difference in your songwriting from when it was recorded to now? How has it evolved or changed?
In general, there's this interesting thing that happens … when you're a kid, you have all this incredible energy and drive, and you don't really have that much experience yet. And I would say to anybody who is young: this is the time, throw it all into writing, trying, working, making—be useful. Don't accidentally spend that energy on binge-watching TV shows or scrolling. That would be so sad, because as you grow up, you become more responsible to other people. I am taking care of a family now. There's no way for me to write the way that I used to, even if I wanted to. I have now known grief. I have known so much of the world that my system is just different. The best thing for people to do is to be reflections of what they are in the time that they are in.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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