

True to her roots as a Russian refugee, Regina Spektor is a musical matryoshka doll. Beneath the outer shell of a butter-wouldn’t-melt songstress-next-door lies a sassy, streetwise New York scene queen with the Strokes on speed-dial. Inside that lurks a proud Slavic traditionalist boasting throwaway put-downs so barbed she could ghostwrite Frankie Boyle’s columns. Within that is a babblin’, wild-child party girl, and within that, at her core, trembles a fragile romantic negotiating a world of drugs, violence, terminal illness, infidelity and sexual power struggles like a Russian Red Riding Hood lost in America’s urban forest.

She’s a whole city’s worth of voices, personas and stories gushing from one woman at a Steinway, and she flips and juggles between them with the dexterity of a cup-and-ball conman or a quick-change artiste. Spektor is a spectacle.

Spektor’s family settled in the Bronx after fleeing Moscow in 1989 to escape religious persecution. That’s when her classical piano training took a wonky sidestep. A decade or so later she became the most eccentric and intriguing performer in New York’s anti-folk scene – which was going some since leading lights the Moldy Peaches were famed for singing songs about porn and crack, dressed as Robin Hood and his overgrown rabbit. She enthralled the East Village’s SideWalk cafe with her experimental, shape-shifting stew of jazz, blues, punk, Cossack cabaret and Jewish klezmer music – the SideWalk is where she sold self-recorded and produced CDs of her first two albums 11:11 (2001) and Songs (2002). Hers was a cottage industry so DIY she made Crass look like the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement; the latter album was recorded solo entirely on Christmas Day 2001 and affixed with the sleeve-note instruction: “When you are listening to this little disk, try to think that you are in on a secret.”

These were real rabbit-hole records; surrealist adventures with sour undercurrents. A character called Mary Ann, channelling Billie Holliday, made “porcupine love, so stiff and stuck and prickly, he came in and back out quickly” and ended her song, purposefully, with a sneeze. Pavlov’s Daughter was seven minutes of mournful soul, folk-rap and scat poetry told by Lucille, a nosy neighbour informing the man upstairs that she can hear him masturbating. Figures of mythic tragedy – Icarus, Samson, an Oedipus musing “my mother had been a rather crazy queen, but not at all like a sex machine” – rubbed shoulders with death row prisoners and the gravediggers burying them. Death frolicked in a flower-pattern frock.

“I’m more like a science fiction or fiction writer than a diarist or an essayist,” she told the Guardian in 2012, but these early urban piano requiems certainly sounded like a scrapbook of her life thus far – her chilly Russian childhood submerged in classical music, the Beatles and Queen, her studies in classical piano at Manhattan School of Music and Purchase College, her schooling in New Jersey and her summers spent hiking in Israel or working on a Wisconsin butterfly farm. And they were made all the more fascinating by Spektor’s vocal fidgets; groans, trills, gasps, spits, hiccups, demon croaks, amateur beatboxing, mobster accents and impressions of animals, drumkits and skipping records. She was a Babel of one-woman sound effects, as though all of her inner nesting dolls wanted to be heard at once.

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She arrived in the UK in 2003 fully formed and with impeccable chaperones. Supporting the Strokes and Kings of Leon at Alexandra Palace, she bewitched 7,000 garage rock fans with just a piano, a chair she’d hit with a drumstick for percussion and an electric guitar for her modest mid-set rock out, which had the unpractised air of David Cameron testing his way around a West Ham chant. Her set was similarly rapt with possibility; several songs wouldn’t appear on record for another three years and the highlights came from her major label debut Soviet Kitsch, released the following year. Poor Little Rich Boy was a febrile portrait of vacuous privilege, Spektor battering her chair-drum like an over-excited community support officer let loose on a student fees protest. For the languid Carbon Monoxide she took the role of a doped-out, possibly suicidal New York hipster doing uncanny impressions of Fozzie Bear. Best of all, Us was an exhilarating chamber-pop toboggan ride, Spektor so lost in a new romance she imagines statues erected and cities renamed in its honour. You had to be welded to the floor not to be swept away.

Listen to Regina Spektor’s album Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers on Spotify

To baffled critics, Spektor was swiftly condensed into the category of “Quirkysomething” alongside the likes of Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, but that belittled a talent too complex to pigeonhole (and did the same to the other musicians). Her every tempo shift jolted us down winding diversions into street fights (Your Honor), cancer treatments (Chemo Limo) and Dickensian ghosts telling businessmen to embrace life by licking rocks and going around shoeless (Ghost of Corporate Future). Few since Kate Bush had mastered the ability to spin such rich modernist poetry of love, comedy, politics and degradation while flitting between voices, characters and styles like a one-woman Broadway musical of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. For “quirkysomething” read “singular-songwriter”.

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Fans of her stark early free-for-alls worried that going full-band – synths, orchestras, chug-rock guitar from the Strokes’ Nick Valensi – on 2006’s Begin To Hope might soften her angular corners for mainstream consumption. Instead it gave her eccentricities a broader canvas on Edit, scrappy rock’n’roll overdose lament That Time and portentous cabaret epic Après Moi. It also framed some of her most moving balladry in Field Below, a rerecorded orchestral Samson and gossamer spiritual Summer in the City, a tear-jerking study of the faltering steps one takes out of Dumpsville. Spektor played a wistful loner, kidding herself her heartbreak is healing, wandering New York hallucinating her long-gone ex “in the backs of other women”. Best, though, to pass over the bit where she gets so lonely she tries to reach orgasm by going to a protest march “just to rub up against strangers”. Not very weep-worthy, frottage.

Yet this was a prime example of her talent for injecting real human failings, perversions and eccentricities into the gentlest of lovelorn ballads, and sneaking a bug into the collective subconscious has only seen her cult star ascend. Over her last two albums – Far (2009) and What We Saw From the Cheap Seats (2012) – she’s refined the balance between gloss and glitch and maintained her gold standard of off-kilter songwriting: Blue Lips beautifully tracing the cosmic demise of humanity, Wallet turning a simple trip to a lost and found department into a cinematic tour de force, Human of the Year imagining the only award ceremony that Kanye West couldn’t stage-invade. Small Town Moon, Don’t Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas), How, Open, grandstanding show-tune The Party; what we heard from the cheap seats was five-star stuff.



Meanwhile her influence has quietly spread. A sizable subset of leftfield singer-songwriters such as Rae Morris, Oscar, the Anchoress, St Vincent and Laura Marling undoubtedly carry her oddball DNA. Barack Obama attends her shows, Peter Gabriel covers her songs, she performs the theme to Orange is the New Black. We’re no longer in on a secret.