Exclusive: scroll to the bottom of this article to listen to Regina Spektor's forthcoming album
When Regina Spektor arrived in America, aged nine, she would use drawings to convey what she was thinking and feeling to the teachers at her new school. The Jewish, Russian-born songwriter, disembarking in New York with dreams of a career as a concert pianist, spoke not a word of English. If she felt unwell, she would draw a thermometer and colour it red. Her upbringing in Moscow, a life of culture, comfort and familiarity, her father a photographer, her mother a music professor, had gone. For a year, while their parents had waited to find out if their application for an exit visa had been successful, Spektor and her first cousin had speculated about their soon-to-be-adopted homeland. "For some reason," says the 29-year-old, "we imagined America as a sort of safari, and we would have endless conversations about what pet we would have. I was going to have two leopards and a jaguar."
The menagerie was not to be. Spektor rode the blow. Later, it became clear that her pianistic ambitions were unlikely to be realised, which was a much harder thing to deal with. Music, her most trusted, her most constant companion, suddenly seemed like a stranger. Listening to Human of the Year, a track on her new album, Far, it is impossible to imagine Spektor ever lacking the language with which to communicate. A song about the rapture, obligations and trials of religious faith, it veers between genres and episodes with the recklessness and confidence that have become her trademarks. Nowhere do you sense a musician experiencing doubt. The vocalist who, just as a few years ago, dismissed herself as "a singer very last - when I have to" is steered as much by her voice and its endless possibilities as she is by what she wants her lyrics to say (or at least allude to), or by where her restless compositional urges lead her. You hear the song and find yourself lost in wonder, reminded just how devastating the mixture of passion, unpredictability and originality in music can be.
Fifteen years ago, though, Spektor was mute, unable to contemplate a musical path that did not involve pounding out the Romantic canon on a concert platform. She was in her mid-teens when she first became aware of female singer-songwriters: her only exposure to songwriting up to that point had been the work of male western bands and the Russian bard tradition. "In the beginning," she reveals, "I didn't even realise that people wrote songs about themselves. The songs I knew were always allegories, stories based on fairy tales, full of twists." Most significantly, in the years before she began writing, Spektor had immersed herself in repertoire that was almost exclusively instrumental.
"All the music I grew up with was on LPs," she adds.
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"For example, Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty: there were no pictures, except in the middle of the LP there was this almost cubist image of a child's cradle. So, when I was listening to the record, I would spend hours looking at it, as if I might find some new picture in it. And that sets you off on an adventure." You could view that set of circumstances and influences as a fecund breeding ground for creativity. To Spektor, though, it seemed like a thick fog, through which she had to journey without a map.
"I was incredibly saddened," the singer says, "that I couldn't be a musician, the thing I'd wanted to be my whole life, and I didn't think there could be anything else. There were two very difficult years. I abandoned (the classical piano) and, yes, I felt guilt. I didn't have the talent or the work ethic, which is a talent in its own right. And I mourned that, definitely."
She was helped, she admits, by a friend, who handed her a mixtape containing songs by Ani DiFranco and Joni Mitchell. "I didn't realise that women were allowed to write songs, which sounds weird, but I just hadn't heard any women that had, and it never entered my mind, either, that I could possibly write some. All of a sudden, the possibility hit me - you know, 'Wow. I could do that. Maybe.' Then I started trying, and that really was shitty. I'd gone from playing really beautiful things to very bad things, and I didn't have any dexterity at all at that point. I was very slow in getting to be able to play and sing at the same time, and the rhythms were crude. Never mind the lyrics."
Ah, the lyrics. Crude they may once have been, but, since her emergence on the fringes of the mainstream in 2003 with the album Soviet Kitsch, Spektor and her lyrics have won legions of fans, while causing detractors to tear their hair out about what they see as her wilful opacity. She has always hated being asked to analyse her songs, to abet the sifting of her lyrics for autobiographical gold.
On Far, the "genius next door" in the song of the same name wades into a lake whose water has a consistency Spektor likens to porridge. On Folding Chairs, it is tempting to discern a progression from the image of the opening and closing of a deckchair to that of a dolphin's jaws; towards the end of the track, with startling accuracy, Spektor imitates the sea creature's yelp. "It came really readily," she deadpans. "It's almost like my body had been waiting to do that its whole life - my inner dolphin." It's possible to divine in the first song, with its story of an enchanted lake, the compulsion to immerse yourself in it despite the hazard, of the arrival of film crews and reporters to witness the spectacle, and Spektor's advice to "hold in your breath, till you come back up", an allegory for the creative process. Yet the danger with such analysis is that you don't come back up at all.
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Characteristically, Spektor won't be drawn on any of this, though later, broadening the discussion out, she says: "Art, creativity, depends on anonymity and isolation. The problem with success is that it can destroy that, invade it." She describes being bowled over by a talk given by the writer Elizabeth Gilbert on "the idea of inspiration and the muse - and how it used to be the case that people thought of inspiration as something 'other' than the person. She made the point that eventually, in our culture, we put all of that onto people themselves; all of the responsibility is then on the person, and everybody thinks of themselves as the god of their work, that they should know everything about it and completely understand it, control it".
She doesn't add that the need to "completely understand" is one also felt by those buying, absorbing, consuming the work. But her subsequent remark renders that superfluous: "To try to go back and take it all apart, then try to put order on it, is almost not fair to it. Let's say somebody actually knows how to fly, but people just can't deal with that, they're constantly looking, going, 'But where is the button, the propeller, the jet?' And eventually the person has to strap on the jet and say, 'Here's the button.' I think that's what happens with people having to explain their songs. The song was flying, and now I'm being pushed to make up shit about it. Sometimes it's almost like people take it as an insult, like you're being facetious or pretentious. Or, and this upsets me even more, people say, 'Random', 'Puts together really cool sounds'. It's not random, it's very specific, and when I'm writing it, it feels like life and death. It would be so much more fun if people went, 'Wow, that's cool, he just flew.'"
After 20 years in America, Spektor may still be finding the menagerie elusive, but there's a human zoo clamouring to be heard within her new album's 13 songs, not to mention the dolphin. And a babble of language, too, communicating, through devices such as satire, melodrama, fiction and fable, emotions that are poignant and authentic. The wordplay, allusion, allegory and false trails that litter Far, the adventures guided by Spektor's internal eye, will delight some and enrage others. With production by ELO's Jeff Lynne, among others, and influences that include gospel, early McCartney, Sondheim, Chopin, church music and ska, Far is her most accomplished, mystifying, eclectic and beautiful release to date. It doesn't just fly, it soars. How depressing if all we can think to ask, as we watch it do so, is: "Where's the button?"
Far is released on June 22 on Warner Bros