2005-03-30 New York, NY | Bowery Ballroom

(with Sean Lennon opening)

Recorded by pattivill:

intro
Ain't No Cover
interlude
Edit with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello
interlude
Ode to Divorce with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello
interlude
Loveology with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello
interlude
Blue Lips with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello
interlude
Ghost of Corporate Future with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello
interlude
Hero + Bartender with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello for "Hero"
interlude
Rejazz
interlude
Pound of Flesh
interlude
Folding Chair
interlude
Baby Jesus
interlude
Ave Maria
interlude
Sailor Song
interlude
"begin to hope"
interlude
Après Moi
interlude
Prisoners
interlude
Summer in the City
interlude
Time Is All Around
interlude
Somedays
interlude
Carbon Monoxide
interlude
Poor Little Rich Boy
interlude
The Flowers
interlude
"open"
interlude
Silly Eye-Color Generalizations
interlude
Samson
interlude
Hotel Song with Chris Kuffner and Ben Kalb on backing vocals
interlude
Your Honor with Chris Kuffner on bass, Ben Kalb on cello, Elliot Jacobson on drums, and Andy Graziano on guitar
interlude
That Time
interlude
Bobbing for Apples
interlude
Reginasaurus
closing

Related: 2005-06 Spin magazine

2005-03-26 Pollstar

LINK

From Russia, With Love

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Updated 03:40 PST Sat, Mar 26 2005

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Most singer-songwriters pine over lost loves. Regina Spektor's was made of polished wood and steel strings. Spektor was forced to leave her beloved Petrof piano at age 9, when the curly haired, classically trained musician and her family moved to the United States from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1989.

"It was considered Soviet property," Spektor said during a recent interview in a café near her new home in New York City's West Village. If you listen closely to the song "The Flowers" on her major-label debut, Soviet Kitsch, you can almost hear Spektor whimsically ruminating on her long lost muse: "Things I have loved / I'm allowed to keep. I'll never know if I go / to sleep."

The nonconformist chanteuse is on tour in North America through April and has spring dates in Europe and the U.K. as well.

Like her music - a Molotov cocktail of lyrical classical piano compositions, indie rock crescendos, fuzzy guitars and playful piano snippets that sound like traditional Russian folk songs - Spektor isn't easily categorized.

"I don't really mean to, but sometimes I will write in code," said Spektor, 25, revealing a mischievous Cheshire cat grin. Her vocal style is equally anomalous. She tends to leap from the lovely, lyrical part of her voice to rap-talk and, on occasion, a raucous yelp. And despite the occasional self-effacing giggle, Spektor isn't shy on stage, either. During one recent show at New York City's Bowery Ballroom, the curvaceous singer swung an electric guitar over her shoulder and, before an awestruck audience that included her mother, father, aunt, uncle and cousins, unabashedly repeated the salacious lyric, "Someone is (insert naughty verb here) to one of my songs."

Luckily for Spektor, her Russian-born parents "speak absolutely wonderful English, but they don't pick up lyrics a lot, unless they see it written down."

While Spektor's parents might not realize what their daughter is singing about, they rarely miss a show. And while Spektor recalls very little of her childhood in Russia, she does remember countless family trips to the opera and ballet.

Spektor spent her formative years in the Bronx, living with her parents by day and playing East Village clubs by night. Several major labels attempted to court the burgeoning singer, to no avail. "For a long time, I was like, (there's that verb again) the establishment! I'll do everything myself," Spektor said. Until she realized she was spending more time standing in line at the post office to ship CDs than writing songs.

Indie tendencies aside, she does have one diva request. "When I go on tour, I make sure I get a keyboard in my hotel room. Otherwise I go insane," she said. Still, a keyboard does not a piano make. During a recent tour in Europe with the Kings of Leon, Spektor's piano withdrawal was so severe, she turned to the guitar.

"The only time I got to play piano was 10 minutes before sound check. At that point, it had been months since I had time to sit down and really be with a piano. I couldn't have one on the road because it's too heavy and too bulky, it was just a mess. So I had like, complete withdrawal by the time I was in the middle of the tour."

If Spektor had her way, she would spend her days playing and writing, not answering the phone or even leaving the house for days at a time. She'd also buy the cherry red Baldwin piano that was lent to her for the Bowery Ballroom show.

"I had nothing to play at home so I would go there and play. I fell in love that red piano," Spektor said of the Baldwin store in Manhattan, where she would practice regularly and became a regular fixture. "It's women-run and they're totally cool. They gave me jellybeans and Oreo cookies and hot chocolate."

2005-03-25 TheMusicEdge.com

LINK

Regina Spektor: The Red Princess

Moscow-born Regina Spektor immigrated to the United States in the late ’80s as former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the Perestroika program, a socio-economic and political restructuring of the Soviet Union that subsequently dismantled the totalitarian state. Now, it would seem that such a drastic change during the formative years would have a profound effect on a person, especially a young woman whose family chose the New York City borough of the Bronx for their new home. The simplest and most intimate way to take a peek into Regina’s life would be to put her new record, Soviet Kitsch, on full blast; her delivery is epic and fresh.

It would be practically impossible to try to sum up Regina’s music by drawing comparisons to peers or contemporary artists. Regina is something different, really different, and not in that hyperbole, rock-journalist or press-sheet kind of way. It’s the minor things, like her interesting vocal inflection and variable approach to songwriting (with both a piano and sometimes a drumstick on a chair) that start out simple and turn out to be monumental and defining. The first time her first single “Us,” gets into your head, you can’t get the internal stereo of the mind to quit hitting repeat.

Her music is void of ego. There is also a sense of danger that the percussive personality of her piano playing brings across when she is banging on the keys and singing; her songs are immaculate short stories about white collar slaves, lonely women, sailors, sinners and everyday folks. A singing raconteur, she’s like the David Sedaris of piano pop, with an ear for irony and a sense of humanity that could break a heart in one note and make you laugh in the next.

Regina hails from a musical family. Her father was a violinist, her mother taught music and Regina started learning classical piano at the age of six. When she moved to New York, the family worried that she wouldn’t be able to continue playing because the family had to sell the piano. Luckily, Regina’s father met violinist Samuel Marder, husband of Manhattan School of Music professor Sonia Vargas. Samuel had the Spektor’s over for dinner one evening and Regina asked Sonia if she could teach her. She took lessons from Sonia until she was 17.

Though Regina has played piano for almost her entire life, she didn’t start singing in front of people until she was much older. “I never sang,” she says. “I didn’t even know I could sing until I was older. My family would make fun of me singing. Sometimes I’d be doing the dishes and I’d get really into it, making stuff up, singing at the top of my lungs and they’d be like, ‘Hey what’s with all the wailing?’ So, I would mostly just sing in the shower and to myself, and when I was 15 or 16 more people would hear it and tell me that it was nice.”

There are some obvious differences between the musical world of Moscow and that of the United States, but Regina sheds some new light on her own personal experience. She says, “For me it was all classical music. We had records, went to concerts, ballets and operas. There were also these bards that were writing simple songs musically but deep and beautiful and poetic lyrics.

“My dad was a photographer who was pretty hip and he would get these great records from the Beatles and Queen and Moody Blues—records he would get from the Czech Republic (when it was still Czechoslovakia) and so he and his friend would make these tapes with this weird Italian pop music and the Beatles and We’d have these tapes floating around the house that I was always exposed to.

"I listened to a lot of Beatles growing up and I didn’t understand any of it, but as I slowly learned English, I started to understand the lyrics [and] it was really cool. People would make fun of me ’cause it would get to a part were it would be like, ‘La, la, la,’ and I’d ask what they were talking about and my dad would say ‘La, la, la,’ get it?”

When it comes to songwriting, Regina has a certain child-like wonderment that comes across in both her delivery and lyrical content. “I just make stuff up,” she says. “I consciously pay attention to life, read and go to museums. I think it’s a necessity and to make art. I think you have to always immerse yourself in learning. You can’t just go on the road and party every night and then get home and party every night and expect to call yourself a musician. But, as I’m working, I’m not trying to art-reference all these things that I see. I just want to make sure that I get those things in there.”

When Regina first started the process of tearing away from her classical background to start writing music for herself she says, “It was absolutely horrendous. I used to cry. It was never my idea to start writing songs. I used to scribble little lyrics down and do songs a cappella then all these friends would say, ‘oh you have a nice voice. You should write songs on the piano.’ But I was like, ‘no the piano is for Chopin and Bach.’ The first time I tried, it was so crude and so bad it sounded like this 'oompa - oompa' music. I couldn’t do the rhythm and it was a painful experience. Then slowly I started being able to change little things.

“Still, I think its part of the game, learning to push that one extra thing. It’s still really fun to see if I can get as dexterous as possible. Some people have some tapes (of early songs) and I haven’t heard them but I’m afraid to hear them,” she says with a laugh. In music, as any profession and art form, there is a continuous learning curve, one that is relentless and always challenging. Regina is always learning, even though her classical chops are top notch. “I’m learning all the time,” she says. "I’ll find one chord I’ve never thought of before and I’ll write a bunch of songs from the inspiration of that one chord. Because I’m so behind on musical exposure, like with Gospel music or pop music, I’ll hear something and the new stuff I hear’ll inspire me. I wrote this song recently that sounds like Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson because I was listening to that at the time and I don’t even know R&B.”

“Ray Charles said, ‘you know, you can never figure her out, you always find something new in her,’ (talking about the piano). It’s true. It’s kind of a lucky instrument because it’s so unnatural and tempered and so human and versatile. It could solo over an entire orchestra or it could be the most intimate little sound. It could be really percussive or really string like.”

Regina, like her exalted explanation of the piano, is tempered, versatile and human in every way.

Thanks Regina!!!

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For more information please visit www.reginaspektor.com

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By Shane Roeschlein

2005-03-24 Time Out New York

Musical theater

Russian-born singer Regina Spektor is drawing a crowd with her dramatic performances

By Alison Rosen

When people see Regina Spektor perform her idiosyncratic piano-pop, they either love her or hate her. Or they think she's a lesbian. "I've had so many people assume I'm gay because I'll sing a song from the point of view of a man,"she says. Gender is just one of many touchy topics Spektor gives the one-finger salute to on her sparkling major- label debut, Soviet Kitsch. On the first cut, "Ode to Divorce," she pushes bound- aries further, singing in elegant operatic tones, "Won't you help a brother out?"

"A writer can sit down and write a monologue from the point of view of an old black man up in Harlem," reasons the 25-year-old musician who was born in Moscow and raised in the Bronx. "Yet in music, for some reason it just doesn't happen. Nothing should be off-limits."

Onstage, Spektor is no less inhibited. She writhes on her glossy red piano bench, beats a wooden chair with a drumstick, and gulps, groans and hic- cups in an orgiastic way that's part human beat box and part rapture.

"As soon as I heard the music, I wanted to be involved," says pro- ducer Gordon Raphael, who met Spektor in 2002 through friend and fellow producer Alan Bezozi (with whom he shares production credits on Spektor's album). "She put one hand on the piano and played Poor Little Rich Boy' while hitting a stick on a chair and singing with this big smile on her face," Raphael recalls. "Everything about it riveted me." He was so taken that he cut his vacation short to start recording Soviet Kitsch, then released the album in the U.K. on his own Shoplifter Records. (Sire issued it in the States earlier this month.) Raphael, who also produced the Strokes' albums, played early tracks for that group's singer, Julian Casablancas, who was similarly smitten and invited Spektor to open for the band on their sold-out North American tour in 2003. But getting a rowdy rock audience to shut up long enough to listen to her sumptuous ballads was sometimes challenging. "People would yell, 'Freebird, and I, as the Russian, was like, What is this Freebird?'" she says, laughing. "The Strokes taught me a valuable lesson, though. If someone heckles you, you tell them to fuck off!"

Warming up someone else's crowds may be a thing of the past. Spektor has performed on Conan O'Brien, is scheduled to appear on Leno on April 20 and is headlining her own national tour. She's particularly excited about her upcoming Bowery Ballroom date. Well, excited and ner- vous. "I've opened there so many times, and I just can't believe I'm going to walk onstage and there's going to be my people there," she says, grinning. "I know it's going to be bigger than anything I can feel."

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Regina Spektor plays Bowery Ballroom Wednesday 30. Soviet Kitsch (Sire) is out now.

New MP3s: Aquarius, Uncle Bobby

Added the following MP3s to the recordings section ("the wires"):

Aquarius
Unreleased song, performed at Sin-é on June 29, 2004

Uncle Bobby
Unreleased song, performed at the Knitting Factory (NY) on September 9, 2004

2005-03-13 The New York Times

LINK

WHAT I'M WEARNING NOW: The Pianist-Singer

[...]

She owns four tutus, which she wears over jeans, and collects T-shirts with chil- dren's TV characters on them. "I have a strange appreciation for clothes be- cause I came from Soviet Russia," she said. "We had uniforms, and you got whatever your parents could get second- hand. As a teen, I was confused by the idea of shopping off the rack, where you'd see 12 of the same thing. So I'd go to thrift stores. I'd buy a sweater and Scotch tape stuff to it."

Here, Ms. Spektor wears a sweater from H&M with a silk tie she found on the Lincoln Center subway platform and and-washed, she said, "to make it crin- kly." But she is learning to appreciate finer pieces, too. Her tweed skirt is by Cacharel (a gift), and her boots are vin- tage Vivienne Westwood. "You can see the artfulness and thoughtfulness in de- signer clothes," she said. "They're very comfortable. When I first saw this skirt, I thought, 'I knew I'd meet you all my life.' " JENNIFER TUNG

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[PHOTO] Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

2005-03-13 SFGate

LINK

POP QUIZ: REGINA SPEKTOR

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By Aidin Vaziri, Staff Writer

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[...]

Q: Do you think Jesus is giving you the words?

A: Who? I'm Jewish.

Q: So it's definitely not Jesus.

A: I don't know. It's an interesting thing. I try not to think about it. I think some songs are like a dream, they just pass right through you. After you play them 700 times in a row, you still don't know where they come from.

[...]

New Video: Regina on Late Night

Credit to miao0726 who posted the original mpeg on the I♥Regina community. The version available here is a compressed version of that file--Windows Media Video, 320x240, ~15MB file size.

2005-03-10 The College Hill Independent

LINK

Respekt Her

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Regina Spektor will blow your English professor's mind

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BY ALEXANDRA DE JESUS

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IF YOU'VE NEVER heard Regina Spektor's music, your life is probably a little sadder than it would otherwise be. Spektor, a classically-trained piano player, writes lyrics as wild as Joanna Newsom's and has a voice as strange and seductive as Björk's.

On her album Soviet Kitsch, just given a major rerelease by Sire Records, Spektor pounds piano keys, knocks drumsticks against furniture, name-drops Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and breaks various glass objects-all in 38 minutes.

Born in Moscow and raised in the Bronx, Spektor attended the Conservatory of Music at SUNY Purchase; after graduation, she began playing shows in and around New York City. She gained a group of devoted fans and released two independent albums: 11:11 and Songs. A meeting with producer Gordon Raphael led to the recording session that yielded Soviet Kitsch-and a US tour with the Strokes.

Regina Spektor has been feverishly promoting Soviet Kitsch. During a recent email correspondence with the Indy, she discussed the literary, the surreal, and more.

Independent: Your songs often include allusions to literary figures: Samson, Oedipus, Ezra Pound. What are your reading habits like? Do you have any favorite books and/or authors?

Regina Spektor: Yeah, I love books and papers and words. My reading habits, like all my other habits, though, are completely inconsistent. So sometimes I read and read and read, and other times I just listen and look. Sometimes I read one book at a time, but often I have a few things going at the same time. I love Chekov, Tennessee Williams, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy. Bulgakov's Master and Margarita is one of my favorite books-but this feels silly, like I'm naming only a few things in a huge well of loved books/authors. Hesse, Dumas, lots and lots of poetry, Kurt Vonnegut, etc.

I: How old were you when your family immigrated to the United States? Do you have any particularly vivid childhood memories of Russia?

RS: I was nine and a half. The half was super-important at the time. I have countless vivid memories of Moscow, and of Parnu (Estonia, where I spent all my summers as a kid), and of immigration through Austria and Italy. It's all this colorful adventure.

I: I find your songs very unique and compelling-both musically and lyrically. Could you describe your songwriting process? Which element of a song usually comes to you first?

RS: I guess, usually, I write it all together. The words and the piano part just come to find where they sit together, and the sounds and everything just kind of roll around over and over, until it all settles as a song. Sometimes I'll hum while walking and write a song, but usually I can never figure out a piano part to it later. It just stays an a cappella song. ["Aching to Pupate," from the album Songs, is a great example. -Ed]

I: Your press release quotes you as saying that touring with the Strokes was "surreal and educational at the same time." Could you describe one moment of that tour which was particularly surreal? And one that was particularly educational?

RS: I think the Strokes were such brave fans to take me on the road. I had never gone on a tour before; I had never even played a club bigger than 300 people. But they really believed in sharing my songs with their fans. Many, many educational things: I had never been on the West Coast, or to the South, before that tour. And to play night after night opening for a band that you love, and to play venues like Theater at Madison Square Garden, where your name is lit up on the marquee, is pretty surreal. I remember walking toward Madison Square Garden and seeing it just as it light up. Strange stuff.

I: Soviet Kitsch has been available at your shows and on cdbaby.com since last year; now it's being released on Sire Records. What brought you and the album to this label?

RS: Sire is an amazing NYC label, and they were starting up again after a long sleeping hibernation period. It was just the right situation and the right people at the right time. I am so happy there right now, and my record is in stores for the first time in this country. They really wanted to re-release it, and I wanted it to get heard.

I: Because you were still unsigned when you toured with the Strokes, you had to cover all of your own expenses. This, clearly, was one disadvantage of being an unsigned artist. But were there any advantages to being unsigned? In other words, is there anything that you miss about it?

RS: Mostly, the things I've gained-a lot of support and a company that works alongside me to promote my music-are much more than what I've given up. I was very careful to retain my creative rights; I wasn't going to sign to any label if it would compromise my music and what I was trying to do. But there is definitely a bureaucratic element that comes with working in every company. Things have to go through a chain of people to be approved. So far I've been very lucky, I don't take it for granted. I'm very aware that the tide can turn. Before I was signed, all I had to do was decide on something and then save up money and work with friends to try and get it done. Now it's a slower process, but there are more people helping and working-so when it does get done, it's in a bigger way.

I: What have you been doing in the past month or so to promote Soviet Kitsch? Do you have any tour plans?

RS: I've been doing so, so much: playing shows, doing press interviews and TV and radio stuff. Makes me nervous, but it's for a good cause. I'll be playing a US tour from the 24th of March to the 21st of April. Then I fly to Paris three days later. After that I play a UK tour. So I'll be on tour for about two months, ending around the middle of May. Pretty intense stuff.

I: Last month I saw you perform here in Providence with the Dresden Dolls. The venue was being very strict about how much time you were allowed. There was a big digital clock on the stage, I remember. It was incredibly sad to see you have to rush through your set. I would love it if you came to Providence again.

RS: Yeah, they were so strict, bordering on mean, actually. I do hope you'll get to see a less rushed show someday. Though I won't be in Providence this time around, maybe I'll see you in Boston, or next time. Take care, yo.

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If you ask her nicely, ALEXANDRA DE JESUS B'08 will make you a mixtape.

2005-03-10 New York, NY | Late Night with Conan O'Brien

Thanks to miao0726, who posted the original mpeg on the I♥Regina community

Us (WMV)

New MP3: Long Brown Hair

Added the following MP3 to the recordings section ("the wires"):

Long Brown Hair
An unreleased song performed at the Housing Works Used Bookstore Cafe on October 15, 2004.

Added Site Search

The contents of reginaspektor.net are now full-text searchable. What's that song that goes...?

New MP3: Happy Hooker

Added the following MP3 to the recordings section ("the wires"):

Happy Hooker
Unreleased song, performed at Barbès on May 11, 2003

Lyrics Added for Almost Every Regina Song

Added lyrics & info pages for the following:

***
2.99 ¢ Blues
8th Floor
AB
Aching to Pupate
All is Love
Après Moi
Aquarius
Ave Maria
Baby Jesus
Back of a truck
Baobabs
Bartender
Bear Spektor (no lyrics)
Belt
Blue Lips
Bobbing for Apples
Bon Idée
Braille
The Bronx
Buildings
BYOS
A Cannon
Carbon Monoxide
Chemo Limo
Consequence of Sounds
Dance Anthem of the 80s
Daniel Cowman
December
Dog & Pony
Düsseldorf
Edit
The Flowers
Flyin'
Folding Chair
The Genius Next Door
Ghost of Corporate Future
Happy Hooker
Hero of the Story
I want to sing
Just like the Movies
Kids
Lacrimosa
A Lesson in How Fleeting Preservation Is
Long Brown Hair
Lounge
Love Affair
Loveology
Lucky Penny
Lulliby
Making Records
Mary Ann
Mermaid
Mockingbird
Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men
Music Box
The Mustard Musketeers
My Man
Ne Me Quitte Pas
Ode To Divorce
Oedipus
Oh, Marcello!
One-String Blues
Paris
Patron Saint
Pavlov's daughter
Poor Little Rich Boy
Prisoners
Raindrops
Reading Time With Pickle
Reginasaurus
Rejazz
Sailor Song
Samson
Scarecrow & Fungus
Silly Eye-Color Generalizations
Soho
Somedays
The Soup
Summer in the City
Sunshine
That Time
Time Is All Around
Twenty Years of Snow
Uh-merica
Uncle Bobby
Us
The Virgin Queen (no lyrics)
The Wallet
Wasteside
You
Your Honor
Title Unknown ("all the rowboats")
Title Unknown ("be like a cloud")
Title Unknown("the clocks were asleep")
Title Unknown("come into my world")
Title Unknown("a cooler version")
Title Unknown("the devil come to bethlehem")
Title Unknown("dust to dust")
Title Unknown("eight miles high")
Title Unknown("the floor heard everything")
Title Unknown("I cut off my hair")
Title Unknown("if you're never sorry")
Title Unknown("I never loved nobody fully")
Title Unknown("no one can take that away")
Title Unknown("open")
Title Unknown("the big towns") (no lyrics)
Title Unknown("will you feel better?")
Title Unknown ("woolen gloves")

2005-03-05 ProductShop NYC

LINK

drinks with regina spektor

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Regina Spektor is the latest talent to emerge from New York’s anti-folk scene. Armed with only a piano, a russian accent, and some light strings, her major label debut, Soviet Kitsch, was released this week by Sire/Warner. She's about to embark on another major US tour. She’ll be performing at the Bowery Ballroom on March 30th with Sean Lennon. I caught up with Regina – which happens to be my mother’s middle name (she used to be embarrassed about it but isn’t anymore) – and chatted about Judaism, thumbs, The Strokes, friends, and lots more. She was funny and quite adorable the entire interview. You just want her to be a lil’ talking teddy bear that you could hug. Of course, the teddy bear would need to keep her defining accent that peppers her singing and speaking voice. Without further ado……

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It’s Product Shop NYC’s round. What are you drinking?
Well, I’m drinking peppermint tea right now. Actually, I have three glasses in front of me. One is a Guinness glass with pear juice. And then I also have a cup of coffee. And then the peppermint tea.

Let’s start with some Jew talk. How has being a Russian-Jew effected your music?
Awesome. Yeah, I’m sure it does affect my music and me because it such a particular brand to be. I think in some ways that I have a more optimistic view of the entire country. More so than most of my friends. For me, I still see America as the land of immigrants dream. I find myself defending America a lot. It’s so much worse in other places. Especially and even now. To me, it’s important to uphold those ideals.

Were you Bat Mitzavah’d?
YES! I had a double Bat Mitzvah with my cousin, Marsha, in the Bronx. Marsha Marsha Marsha. It was really cool. It was basement of the synagogue where I was taught hebrew and everything. I wore this great big poofy dress that had like this white collar and I thought it was the best dress ever and, well yeah, it wasn’t. I thought it was so gorgeous. The whole community came to it. They had known me and Marsha for ever. We started going to there when we were nine. The party was great. We, me and Marsha, played piano at it. We dueted. It was so fun. We’re like twin sisters, except she’s a lot smarter than me. She’s in grad school for psychology and I write songs on a piano.

What is your song writing process? Are you able to sit and write everyday or do you have infrequent spurts of creativity?
More in spurts. I can’t figure out if its necessity or how I am. You try to write every day if I’m not running around all over the city. If I wake up and sit at my piano and I do write. I always start to work. Don’t quote me on this, I don’t know if it was Tchaikovsky who said it, but there is this quote like, “Not a day without a line” and he wasn’t talking about cocaine. He was saying that ever when you’re not inspired, you have to work and write. Sometimes you stumble on something and you work a lot of hours in a row and you have something. I don’t if that made sense. And now I’m going to start drinking my coffee

What are your feelings of “Modern Girls and Old-Fashion Men” a curse or a blessing?
Of course I’m proud of it. To me, it’s such a good song. It’s also the first time I sang a song I haven’t written. Julian wrote the whole thing. He wrote all over the places in airports, on tour. He finished it in a taxi. We had one day in a farm outside of Seattle and everyone was sick and tired. Except Fab I think. He was healthy. It was the first time we were in nature the whole tour. We got to record the vocals outside. There was a dog named Elevator there and everyone called her Ellie. We called her Vator. So the dog would bark whever we would sing loud. And Julian and I were doing our vocals at the same time and were singing loudly and the dog kept barking. We had to stick together a bunch of takes in the end. The only curse is that everyone asks me about The Strokes. I thought it was brave of them to take me on tour. I went from little bars to all over America. It was very kind. We're still very good friends. Them, me, Kings of Leon.

So the new record is out now and…
It’s out! Its out! I bought it! Actually, I bought it in two places. The first place was in Union Square Virgin Megastore. I was looking in new releases section and I couldn’t find it and then it hit me. It was right there. It started the second I got out of the subway. I got out of the subway and I was on a this rollercoaster. The guy who sold it to me went, “Would you like a bag for that.” And I was freaked out. I watched people pick it up and look at it and put it back on the shelf and it was so weird. I then also bought it at Other Music because it’s a great store and they’re really nice. They have big picture of me. It was weird. I felt like everyone could see me naked. It was crazy.

You said that the uptown Tower Records also has a window display.
I was looking at The Gates with David Kahne, who is working on The Strokes record, and he told me that they have the cover at Tower Records and I just didn’t believe him and we walked and talked and then GASP! There it is. It’s like something no real. Like look how big my head is.

Do you ever listen to your own records?
No. I mean. Unless someone puts me in the room and makes me. I listened to it so much while making it and mastering it. Usually what happens is, when enough times passes, I end up walking into a friends house and they’ll be playing something of mine and then I’ll be like “That sounds familiar” and not even realizing its mine for a minute. I’m to busy listening to other peoples records.

What’s your personal favorite song on your new record?
I don’t have a favorite necessarily. ‘Chemo Limo’ is one that is so particular. I just wrote it while I recorded but I don’t play it, but I never say never. I might but I just don’t. It’s like asking, which one of your fingers do you like the most. You have the pinky, the thumb….

What do you write your lyrics based on.
All fiction. Made up stuff. I’m not really sure what a lot of it is. Imagine all this made up stuff that’s rooted in real stuff. Fantasies. Sometimes I get a kick in the butt and then a year passes and I’ll walk into a studio and I’ll hear a demo and the song will remind me of something new and feel honest to me in a way that it didn’t before. I’m very secretive that’s why talking about myself is so weird. I don’t write about my own life. Event the encoded stuff is like hmmm. Hahah. Most of it is not. I’m thoughtful in life when I’m looking at art. When I write I don’t think about it. I just don’t want to be crude and thoughtful. Although, I really have the mouth of trucker.

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DOWNLOAD: Regina Spektor - Poor Little Rich Boy

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Posted by Jason at 12:51 PM

Added MP3s

The following MP3's were added to the recordings section ("the wires"):

Belt
Unreleased song, performed at Tonic on May 1, 2002 (with Anders Griffen on drums)
8th Floor
Unreleased song, performed at the Sidewalk Cafe on May 4, 2002 (with Anders Griffen on drums)
"will you feel better?"
Unreleased song (title unknown), performed at C-Note on February 15, 2003
Dance Anthem of the 80s (Watch)
Unreleased song, performed at C-Note on February 15, 2003
"dust to dust"
Unreleased song (title unknown), performed at Sin-é on May 31, 2003
Düsseldorf
Unreleased song, performed at Sin-e on May 31, 2003
"a cooler version of yourself"
Unreleased song (title unknown), performed at the Living Room on December 29, 2003
Edit
Unreleased song, performed at Tonic on October 16, 2004 (with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello)
Loveology
Unreleased song, performed at Tonic on October 16, 2004 (with Chris Kuffner on bass and Ben Kalb on cello)
"if you're never sorry"
Unreleased song (title unknown), performed at Bowery Ballroom on January 21, 2005 (thanks for this one to Keith--for taping--and Jenn--for sharing)