REGINA Spektor is happy to be home. “If I had my way, I would do all my work in New York. This is where I feel the most connected and happy.”
Born in Russia and raised in The Bronx, the bubbly redheaded songstress became an NYC fixture by playing regularly – complete with a piano and some drumsticks to characteristically bang on her bench – at small, cozy East Village music dens like the Living Room and Sidewalk Café.
Then, suddenly, she was opening for the Strokes’ “Room on Fire” tour and re-releasing her self-released album “Soviet Kitsch” on Sire Records.
Spektor, ever the humble artist, seemed to go from the downtown open-mike scene to world tours, festivals and playing 5,000-capacity spaces like the McCarren Park Pool, where she performs with special guests, including her career-launching tour mate, Albert Hammond Jr., on Friday, all in what seems like a heartbeat.
Ask her how it all happened, and she’ll tell you it’s something of a mystery.
“One of the things that’s so amazing about [success], but also very scary, is the realization that you don’t really have control over it. So many things have to line up,” she says. “I always think, ‘I really hope I get to make more records and tour more,’ because I wouldn’t really know how to make it happen again.”
Nor does she like to over-
analyze her creative process, and perhaps that’s why it has taken her so long to follow up 2006’s Billboard hit “Begin To Hope.” She worries that “if you talk about it to no end and figure it all out, then it won’t be effective.”
Offbeat yet catchy songs like “Better,” “Fidelity” and “Us” have catapulted her to success because of their range: from quiet and slow to fast and frantic; poppy to weird. She claims to never know what’s going to come out next. “It’s like a trail mix,” she says.
A self-declared perfectionist with a “very self-critical type of mind,” she’s been recording this much-awaited follow-up slowly and fitfully, hampered by a busy schedule. And as much as she loves coming home, her travels have inspired her. She cites artists like Tom Waits, Patti Smith and even Gertrude Stein as inspirations: artists who were “always in pursuit of something new to them. That’s the world that I’m really interested in.”
Maybe that’s why the world – New York, especially – is so interested in her. Honest devotion to “making good art.” Imagine that.