Russian Doll

Regina Spektor on the meaning of the expression "The eyes fear, but the hands do."

by Gwynne Watkins

May 23, 2006

Nobody plays the chair like Regina Spektor. During her concert staple "Poor Little Rich Boy," the diminutive singer-songwriter bangs out a right-handed drumbeat on a wooden chair. It's this kind of adventurousness that separates Regina Spektor from other piano-playing songstresses. During a heartfelt ballad, she might start breaking words down into syllables, turning her melody into percussion. Or she might start grunting. Or spitting. Or listing the ingredients from the back of a pickle jar. Her emerging body of work is confident, vulnerable and innocently sexy. The upcoming album "Begin to Hope" promises to steer that unique sound into radio-friendly territory. Hooksexup spoke to Spektor about her Russian background and the pitfalls of a childlike image. — Gwynne Watkins

I'm happy see that the song "Samson" is on the new album.
Yeah, we just made a video for it and it's really beautiful. It's black and white. It's got birds and sheet music and it's got a lot of origami-type animation.

So why aren't there more songs about sex and the Bible?
I don't know. It seems like all my songs are about sex and the Bible.

I think that would be a good album title.
Yeah. Sex and the Bible sounds like a lot of freshman liberal arts college courses.

I think I took all those courses. So on the song "Fidelity," one of the lines is "Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my own fall." Do you think of your songs as love songs?
I think in some ways I do, because of them are sort of like a love letter to humanity. Definitely, there's some music that I love that maybe comes from aggressive places, or cerebral places, that I enjoy on that level. But in general, stuff that I write comes from a very loving place.

But a lot of your songs seem to describe the ending of relationships, like "The Flowers" and "Ode to Divorce."
I don't really think about my songs as being about relationships. First of all, I have no fucking clue what half of them are about anyway. But the ones that I do try to figure out, I think it's more about interacting with the world. For example, one of the main ideas in "The Flowers" is "Things I have loved I'm allowed to keep." It's not necessarily about relationships as much as a very human sentiment that could be extended toward any aspect of our world, you know? We're kind of hoarders.

I wrote something about you for Hooksexup and I compared your songwriting to stacking little images like Legos. What would you compare it to?
I don't know. I like that. I love Legos. They're like collections of little images that come into something that you could see something in. I have no fucking clue, really.

Have you ever thought about giving yourself a band name instead of being Regina Spektor?
You know, I have. It's funny, because you get to see things that are written from your name, like "said Regina Spektor," and they're not even real quotes. There are a lot of things that are now compiling into my character portrait that aren't even real. Now in my mind, there's like, a "Regina Spektor" - my thing - and then there's me, but I'm sort of title-less. [laughs] Also, I think with women in general, a lot of the time they just want to turn you into a name, like "Beyonce" or "Ashanti." You don't see a lot of "Mikes" around, you know what I mean? And to me, I thought it would be a sign of disrespect just to be "Regina." So I think in my personal life, I'm just Regina now. And my full name is my band name.

You spoke Russian before you spoke English. Are there any good Russian sayings that we don't have in English?
There's one great one that I love which basically comes to mean "The eyes fear, but the hands do." Your mind and your eyes see something and they fear it, but your body goes through and does the work. I really love that one.

Is there a Russian person besides you who deserves to be better known in the U.S.?
Oh my god, I'm at the very bottom of the list! I always tell people to check out Vladimir Vysotsky. He was a great Russian actor and writer, a bard. He wrote hundreds of songs. They're full of all these different kinds of characters, a lot of them are just everyday Soviet life, a lot of them are war songs in the first person even though he never lived through World War II, but he was such a great actor that he had this amazing ability to just be very, very inside the character, you know? Very psychological. And he's got a very powerful voice that's very not like any other voice you'll hear. So sometimes I tell my American friends to listen to him even though they don't understand it, just because of the amount of emotion that you could get from listening to him.

Do you get tired of being referred to as childlike?
Do I get referred to as childlike? I guess it depends how it's said, you know? I mean, it's definitely not an insult. I think that people are very careful about having some sort of a consistent image or being "respected" or "adult" or "for real" or whatever the hell it is they're trying to be. And maybe I don't care as much and maybe it comes off? I don't know. I don't feel very childlike.

Do you have a raunchy secret side that's going to break out and surprise people?
I don't think I have any secret side. I'm pretty much open with everything. Am I a dominatrix in my spare time? No, not really. I don't know what "adult" is in our culture anymore. Triple X? [laughs]

I don't know, triple-x can be pretty immature.
Yeah, I mean, that seems just like playing with lots of toys to me. It's an interesting idea, you know? What's considered "adult," what's considered "childlike."

Your song "Bobbing for Apples" has the line "Someone next door is fucking to my song." If that were to actually happen, would you be more freaked out or flattered?
Ha. I definitely think it's flattering. n°

© 2006 Gwynne Watkins and hooksexup.com.