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| Birth Name(s) : Regina Spektor |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
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| Profession:
Singer, songwriter, record producer |
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Full Regina Spektor Biography
Regina Spektor (Russian: Регина Спектор; born February 18, 1980) is a Russian-born American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered on New York City's East Village.
Spektor was born in Moscow, Russia, USSR to a musical Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, a photographer, was also an amateur violinist. Her mother was a music professor in a Russian college of music, and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.
Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Unfortunately, Regina had to leave her piano behind. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination, with which Jews were faced.
In New York, Spektor gained a firm grounding in classical music from her piano teacher, Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music. Spektor studied with Vargas—whom Spektor's father had met through violinist Samuel Marder, Vargas's husband—until she was 17. Although the family had been unable to bring their piano with them from Russia, Spektor found a piano on which to practice in the basement of her synagogue, also utilizing tabletops and other hard surfaces for this purpose.
She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, most importantly at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe, but also at the Living Room, Tonic, Fez, the Knitting Factory, and CB's Gallery. During this period, she sold her self-produced CDs 11:11 (2001) and Songs (2002) at such performances.
Spektor has said that she has created 700 songs, but that she rarely writes any of them down. She has also stated that she never aspired to write songs herself, but songs seem to just flow to her. Spektor's songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination. Her songs show influences from folk,, punk, rock, Jewish, Russian, hip hop, jazz, and classical music. Spektor's musical style has drawn many comparisons to fellow singer-pianists Fiona Apple and Tori Amos. Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole.
Her lyrics are equally eclectic, often taking the form of abstract narratives or first-person character studies, similar to short stories or vignettes put to song. Spektor usually sings in English, though she sometimes includes a few words or verses of Latin, Russian, French, and other languages in her songs. Some of Spektor's lyrics include literary allusions, such as to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in "Poor Little Rich Boy", The Little Prince in "Baobabs", Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood in "Paris", Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare in "Pound of Flesh", Boris Pasternak in "Après Moi", Samson and Delilah in "Samson", and Oedipus the King in "Oedipus". She also used a line from Joni Mitchell's California in her song "The Devil Came to Bethlehem". Recurring themes and topics in Spektor's lyrics include love, death, religion (particularly Biblical and Jewish references), city life (particularly New York references), and certain key phrases have been known to recur in different songs by Spektor, such as references to gravediggers, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the name "Mary Ann". Spektor's use of satire is evident in "Wasteside," which refers to the classic satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov The Twelve Chairs, and describes the town in which people are born, get their haircut, and then are sent to the cemetery.
Subsequently, she has appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien (twice), The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (twice), Jimmy Kimmel Live, Last Call with Carson Daly (three times), Late Show with David Letterman, CBS News Sunday Morning, Good Morning America and Australia's Rove Live. Since roughly January 2005, Spektor has performed on a bright red Baldwin baby grand piano.
In Australia, Spektor's music has rapidly gained popularity in mainstream culture primarily due to Begin To Hope being played on the nation-wide radio station Triple J, where it eventually became a feature album. Prior to Begin To Hope, Regina Spektor had only a small following in Australia in comparison to the US and Europe.
Fidelity was also used in a 2007 television commercial in New Zealand advertising Yahoo!Xtra, a new partnership between Yahoo! and Telecom's Xtra ISP. Also in 2007, the mobile phone company, Vodafone, used her lyric, "Come into my world..." from the track, "Hotel Song" on Begin to Hope, in an extensive TV advertising campaign in the UK and Ireland.
In an October 4, 2007 Get Fuzzy comic, Rob Wilco was shown wearing a Regina Spektor t-shirt; his cat Bucky referred to her as the little chick singer on (his) t-shirt . |
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