Regina Spektor shares how she overthrew her inner totalitarian
Two years ago, Regina Spektor was sitting at her piano, alone inside an old church-turned-recording studio down the road from her Woodstock, New York home.
Though she’d just been starting work on an album as the pandemic took hold, she and her family had decamped from New York City while the producer of the album was self-quarantining in Los Angeles.
Spektor had left the city for the health and safety of her family – she and her husband were expecting their second child – but also to guard against what she worried was a kind of artistic dictatorship of the self.
“A human at a certain age just starts to get pulled towards totalitarianism,” Spektor says by phone in advance of her upcoming shows at the House of Blues in Anaheim and the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Aug. 8 and Aug. 10. (For tickets and information go to reginaspektor.com/tour.)
“Even within their own life, they’re like: ‘This is what I think is good. This is what I think is bad. This is what I think is delicious. This is what I think is crap.’
“You start to sort of be a tiny, little, you know, Napoleon of your own world,” says Spektor, 42, whose family immigrated from the Soviet Union when she was a child.
So as she and producer John Congleton sent sound files back and forth from coast to coast, Spektor says she stayed alert to any signs of stagnation in the words and music of the songs she recorded for what would become “Home, Before and After,” her eighth studio album.
And although she speaks to the darkness and difficulties of the pandemic, the distance and solitude of the lockdown affected her in a way that kept the record fresh and new.
“To make the best of it, I did get to work in this new way,” Spektor says. “If I was just in the comfort of a studio and I could just be right there I would be, you know, my little totalitarian self.”
Back to the road
During our conversation, Spektor was in the odd kind of limbo that musicians experience when they’re on tour for a new record. After an earlier run of shows, which included a powerful performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in March, she was on a break before returning to Southern California.
“It’s kind of that strange time where you’re back from one leg of the tour and you’re about to go on another leg of the tour,” she says. “So you’re not here nor there. You’re just sort of floating.”
These are solo shows, mostly Spektor at the piano, though exactly how they’ll unfold remains a mystery even to her.
“I always just kind of walk around the stage and sort of do different things,” she says. “Sometimes a little bit of guitar and a little bit of keyboard and some a cappella. Sometimes I hit things. Hit things with drumsticks.”
Most shows this year have included four or five songs from “Home, Before and After.” Her 2008 breakthrough album “Begin to Hope” and the following year’s “Far” are always well represented, too, but beyond that, Spektor keeps her options open from night to night.
“I have sort of the fun task every tour, and sometimes even every show, of just kind of unearthing all kinds of different set lists and making different things happen,” she says. “So whatever it’s going to be this time, it’s going to be really different from Disney Hall.
“Each one is kind of a little moment. It keeps it very exciting for me to just kind of go with the different feelings of the place itself and whatever I’m in the mood for, I guess. And also whatever my memory is able to retain.”
A different kind of record
“Home, Before and After,” is unique, Spektor says, due to the circumstances of its creation.
“It’s actually the first record in my life that has two birthplaces,” she says. “It was half born and raised in California, where John was at the time, and it was half born in upstate New York, where I was pandemic-ing in Woodstock. Because I ran away from New York because I was pregnant and terrified, obviously, of COVID and people.”
Alone in the former church sanctuary, stained glass windows high on the walls above her and the piano, Spektor says the strangeness of the album’s delivery offered a newly creative way to work.
“It was a very kind of really different experience where there wasn’t really feedback from John during any of the recording,” she says. “In some ways it was absolutely crazy-making and tedious. When you’re just like, ‘Oh, wait, at two minutes and three seconds and four milliseconds, the drumbeat that is the second drum kit needs to be, like, two dB down.’
“It’s just the sort of thing that we go through so that nobody ever has to think about it ever again, and they can just listen to a song and be happy, hopefully,” Spektor says. “That stuff was kind of an incredible learning experience for me. But also some of it was very freeing because it gave me time between sort of.
“In a studio, a lot of time, I make these very quick, quick decisions. Very sort of knee-jerk reactions. Like, ‘No, I don’t really like that. Let’s mute it. Let’s take this down. No, that’s not the right sound.’”
In the absence of real-time decisions – digital files would fly back and forth across the continent, but still time paused – the waiting led to creative contemplations.
“There was kind of a more open process for me, which was very fun,” Spektor says. “Because I think when you’re making records for over two decades, the excitement comes from doing something in a new way.
“Even if some of those experiments end with, ‘You know, that’s really not right for the song,’ some of them end with like, ‘I would never have thought of that and that’s amazing for the song.’”
Emotional fictions
The 10 songs on “Home, Before and After” are a mix of new and old, emotional tales that aren’t as autobiographical as listeners sometimes speculate, Spektor says.
“I just write songs as I live my life, and I accumulate them,” she says. “And I sort of ended up having, I don’t know, like a piggy bank of songs. When it’s time to make a record, some of them just naturally float up for whatever reason.”
A few of them are older, unrecorded songs, such as “Loveology” and “Raindrops,” which fans had asked her to release for years. Others are new lyrics and melodies made in the moment.
“I just go very instinctively and start feeling what feels right coming out of my mouth, and feels right at that moment to kind of capture,” Spektor says. “And there are songs that I’ve been trying to get for years. I always think, ‘OK, well maybe that’ll be on the next record.’ And they don’t end up on any record still, because I started to play them and they’re just not right.
“For whatever reason, I can’t deliver them in the way that imagined, and so I just kind of let it go, because maybe I’ll deliver them in the right way in 10 years or 20 years,” she says. “They kind of exist outside of time.”
Lyrically, all her songs hold her emotions even if most of their characters are not drawn directly from her own life, Spektor says.
“I don’t really have that kind of narrative where a lot of people are like, I was thinking about this and this record is about this,” she says.
“I do kind of function a little bit more like a short story writer,” Spektor says. “Or like a fairy-tale writer or somebody who kind of collects these ideas.”
This is not to say, she adds, that her songs are not the product of her own thoughts and feelings.
“Sometimes people mistake the fact that maybe you work more in the realm of fiction, where you use your imagination more, as something that’s less personal,” Spektor says. “I’m always just trying to kind of be an advocate for fiction, because fiction is sort of my tribe. I really love the imagination. I love fiction. I love myths. I love fairy tales.”
Fiction can be every bit as emotional and moving as autobiography, she adds.
“Sometimes, I find it more emotional,” Spektor says, pointing to a trio of characters created by Tolstoy, Pushkin and Shakespeare. “Anna Karenina, just because she was made up. Or like (Eugene) Onegin, or any of these characters. Macbeth.
“They’re made up, but they are so emotional to me. They’re just not built on, ‘Oh, this happened to me at this moment.’ They’re a little bit different than that.”