2004-12 Blender

THE NEXT BIG THING!

Regina Spektor

A Moscow-born piano-playing whiz kid with the Strokes in her corner

BY PAULINE O'CONNOR

BEFORE SETTLING INTO a Tribeca café, Regina Spektor has one request: Can she switch chairs with Blender? "I feel really weird if I don't get the window seat," she explains. "When I lived in Paris, I got in the habit of hanging out in cafés and watching people walk by."

The gimlet-eyed Spektor has seen a lot in her 24 years. Born in Moscow, she moved with her parents to the Bronx when she was 9. "We came for religious and political freedom. Russia was a very unpleasant place to be Jewish."

In Russia, Spektor's father had been a scientist and her mother a music professor, but both had to take menial jobs to make ends meet in America. Spektor, too, picked up work wherever she could: turning pages for concert musicians, farming butterflies and work- ing at a detective agency, about which she is KGB-cryptic: "It's classified."

All this outsiderness would feed her oddball musical style - a weirdly ancient-sounding mash-up of pre-rock and art-school piano delivered in a voice that swoops from whisper to moan and back again. "My songs take elements of classical music and literature," says the bookish Spektor, who finished college in three years, "and mix them with an 'I can do whatever I want' punk-rock attitude."

Her Björk-meets-Pushkin act eventu- ally attracted Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, who, after hearing the demo that would become her major- label debut, Soviet Kitsch, was so taken he invited her to tour with his band. Though much ado has been made of their relationship, Spektor denies a romantic involvement. "Julian took me under his wing like family, all the Strokes did," she says. "He's taught me so much about this business."

Two months on tour with the kings of New York was enlightening - and grueling. "It almost broke me," she says. "I am not a rock & roll band - that's not me." She shrugs. "I want to be play- ing in cafés when l'm 80." (BLENDER]

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OUT NOW SOVIET KITSCH SIRE

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The old men playing chess see that young girl with the flower dress"

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BJÖRK-MEETS-PUSHKIN EAST-VILLAGE WEIRDNESS

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ALL ABOUT ME!

FAVORITE BOOK

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

RECOMMENDED ACTIVITY WHILE LISTENING

Playing in a sandbox

MOST DIVA-LIKE DEMAND

A bottle of Jack and a working keyboard

LEAST FAVORITE COMPARISON

Tori Amos