When Regina Spektor's son was born in early 2014, the acclaimed singer-songwriter and pianist worried she'd have no little to no time to dedicate to her songwriting. Even worse, she tells Esquire that she feared she'd be so tired her creative well might run dry.

"That's the thing that surprised me the most," she says. "I actually was able to work more than I had in many years."

As Spektor explains, the arduous, sleep-deprived process of raising a newborn helped her focus on her craft like never before. "I would use the 30 minutes that I would have thrown away seven times over in the previous part of my life and I would write a song in it," she says, detailing a concentrated process that led the 36-year-old to write and record her seventh album, and arguably her most adventurous one yet, Remember Us to Life, due Sept. 30. "A friend of mine was saying that she felt having a baby concentrated her into a being and everything that had been fuzzy around the edges you're able to really use yourself in a very full way with full power," Spektor continues. "I definitely found that to be true."

The woman dubbed "her generation's Joni Mitchell" by Rolling Stone has long made a habit of spinning fictional, winding tales into songs that utilize humor and absurdity for the purpose of pointed social commentary. Her new LP is no different. Over a jaunty summertime stroll of a piano line on "Older and Taller," Spektor addresses the cruel reality of ageism ("And you retired just in time / you were about to be fired / for being so tired / from hiring the ones who will take your place"). One song later, on the beatific "Grand Hotel," in what might be the most stirring song of her career, the Russian-born singer weaves a tale of adolescent escape littered with mythic obstacles ("And running through forests, they screamed in chorus / while piercing fair maidens / dressed in their horns"). "It's my favorite thing to get lost in a story because you can learn about yourself," she says.

Spektor also pushed the sonic boundaries this go-round: "With this record I felt like I got to a place I've always wanted," Spektor offers, specifically referencing her unencumbered ability to use her classical music background to full effect this time by employing "orchestral colors" on several songs and, on tracks like the ominous "Small Bill$," playing around with a variety of synthesizers in new and exciting ways.

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ESQ: I imagine your life changed in a major way since becoming a parent following 2012's View From the Cheap Seats. How did that affect you as a creative?

Spektor: I actually did more writing. All of these songs on this record—the record has 11 and the deluxe has 14, but really there were more that just didn't get put on the record—got written in that time. And I have to say, I thought I would write a lot more when I was pregnant, like, "Here I am just wobbling around the house," but I didn't really want to. I felt really guilty about it: I have this time now and I won't later. But I just wanted to cook and take a lot of art in. I wanted to go to a concert or go see a play and watch a lot of shows on Netflix. But pretty early after having the baby, it's almost how if someone breaks their leg you have to start doing physical therapy really soon before it's even fully healed. So even though you're tired and really overwhelmed, you can still start little bits of finding time for yourself, even if it's 15 minutes. And once I did, I would use it really well. Of course it's also a really fucking hard time. [Laughs] But it's also really incredible.

That sleep deprivation could potentially lead to lucid insight.

Painters like Picasso and Dali, they used to fast—everybody used to take drugs and every other kind of thing and every upper and downer and sideways-er that you could find to get into an alternate state of mind. Because that's the thing every artist, painter, writer wants: They're dying to pop out of their perspective, just even for a second, and get a glimpse. It's like you're trying to see yourself from the back just for a second.

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There's often an emphasis on an artist being creative in their younger years, but I'm of the belief that an artist doesn't hit his or her creative stride until later in life. Have you found that to be true?

I think it all has its purpose, and it all has its gift. There's something you are when you are very young that is very powerful. And maybe you don't ever get that particular thing ever again. I think the whole beauty of our human experience if we get the chance, if we get the length of time that a lifespan is—this is optimistic that we get to be old—we get to experience all of those things. 'Cause it would suck not to experience that feeling of "I'm absolutely invincible and I am smarter than everybody and good at everything" mindset that you have as a teenager and in your early 20s. Or like, "Yeah, I can take the subway at three in the morning, and I can play seven days a week and not get tired, and I can write a new song every day." But it goes away. But at that age, you're really trying things on. You're ingesting so much art and you're not maybe as much yourself. At least I wasn't. I wasn't as much myself back then as I am now. But you're molding yourself; you're your own sculpture. It's very important to have that time. I always wonder about kids doing it now because they're doing it in public. It's almost like you're doing it, but you're looking in the mirror all the time. When I was doing it I wasn't looking in the mirror—I didn't have a mirror. [Laughs] We didn't have Facebook, Instagram, all those things. I couldn't even record every idea I had. I didn't have a recording device in my phone.

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Talk to me about your new album, Remember Us to Life. Did you feel as if these were songs you could not have written in your younger days?

It felt like I had never written songs like these before. I think some of it just comes with time. The way I see every record is sort of like getting to go to university for so many months. I'm going to take all the courses I want to. I've always wanted to experiment with this synthesizer or that orchestration. I treat them as a continuing education. You experiment with a certain amount of things and you get to a new place. I also think whenever you have a great new life experience, you join humanity in a new way. "Oh, this is what everybody's been writing or painting about for the last 1000 years!" That also happens with difficult things like death or grief. And it definitely happens in a giant way when you have a child. For instance, it dawned on me that I have incredible parents.

Yes, I've come to realize with every passing year that my parents were beyond amazing to me.

They loved me that much. Fuck! Why didn't anybody tell me? [Laughs] I was a shitty teenager. Why didn't I understand on that gut level that parents love their kids so much?

Shervin Lainez

I imagine your life experiences over the past year have helped put your life, career, and, well, everything into perspective. To that end, it's been 10 years since your breakout album, 2006's Begin to Hope. Is it easier now to focus on your craft seeing as the pressure and expectation that surrounded you at that time has somewhat subsided? Or does the accompanying anxiety remain?

I wonder about it. I think you're still how you are always: a person who gets anxious about certain things, they will always go through those modes. For me it has to do with my headspace on any given day. We have internal weather and it changes just like external weather, and it's different all the time. When we're in the storm, we forget that there might be a month stretch of incredible weather. I'm not going to guess why we're built that way, but if I was to venture a guess, it's to do with this constant need for a change of perspective and to experience life in a whole new kind of way. You never get that smooth-sailing, sure-footed thing. If you did, you won't be able to grow. Growth happens when you're pushed. There are days for sure where I really get it and I'm myself, and this is what I'm like, and this is what I do, and it feels rad. But there are other days where I'm like, "Who the fuck am I? Why don't I get any of this? Why am I getting it all wrong? Why does everything feel so painful?" Just a lot of "why." But in the end you are exactly who you were always and you're confused. There's something wonderful about that. It doesn't feel wonderful in the moment, but it only feels that way if you think of it in a big-picture kind of way. But you never figure it out. So beware of smug people who have it all figured out.

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You've been labeled as a storyteller, which, in my opinion, is perhaps the biggest compliment a songwriter can be offered.

Exactly. It makes me really happy. My favorite artists are all storytellers. The truth is, even if you're not trying to be a storyteller, you end up telling stories. Our whole narratives are stories we tell ourselves ,and sometimes we change them to fit what we need to believe. My tribe are fiction writers: When I say that, I mean short-story writers and novelists and songwriters and people who tell stories through painting, through dance. I love fiction. I love myth. I love fairy tales. I love everything that you can experience yourself on the backdrop of and learn something through how you reflect it.

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