2005-04-01 The Boston Globe

WITH HER MUSIC, REGINA SPEKTOR CREATES A WHIMSICAL WORLD FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

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BY JOAN ANDERMAN, GLOBE STAFF

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Glamorous as it looks, workers in the rock music trenches are perilously jaded, and frankly exhausted. There are so many bands. So many of them sound like the other ones. It takes some doing to get excited, and more often than not the rare happy jolt arrives unexpectedly, even against one's will. When Gordon Raphael found Regina Spektor, he was neither in the market nor in the mood.

It was Christmas 2002, and Raphael, a record producer whose most famous client is the Strokes, had just moved to London, where he was coming off a busy year working with upward of 30 bands. He was physically spent and musically fried, and he was on his way to Seattle for vacation from verses and choruses. When a good friend invited him to meet a young Russian woman who plays piano and sings, Raphael declined. The friend pressed. Raphael grudgingly agreed to stop in New York for a day. Pleasantries were not a part of his game plan. "I walked into TMF studios, sat down, and said, 'What do you do?' " Raphael recalls.

"Regina started playing piano with her left hand. She was banging a stick on a chair with her right hand, and it sounded like horses galloping over a plain. She was singing this complicated melody in this classic voice but her lyrics were modern, like the Moldy Peaches. And she was smiling at me the whole time. I said, 'My God. Go get the microphone.' "

Raphael and Spektor recorded three songs that afternoon. When he returned from Seattle (where Raphael spent his so-called vacation sending e-mail messages to Spektor) they finished an EP, and then coproduced with Alan Bezozi, the mutual friend who had introduced them a full album in New York and London.

"Soviet Kitsch" was released last month on Sire Records, and it's easy to understand why Raphael responded so viscerally.

Spektor's intricate keyboard work, stream-of-consciousness songs, and intense, quirky singing will earn her plenty of comparisons to Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Bjork.

But Spektor, who performs tonight at the Paradise Lounge, carves her own niche: a whimsical, literate musical world inspired by Tchaikovsky and Queen, Hemingway and Picasso, free jazz and the Beat poets.

"I'm a messy girl," says Spektor, 25, who is sitting in a Soho cafe, and speaking on her cousin Marsha's cellphone.

Spektor is talking about her apartment, her approach to songwriting, and her life. "I don't understand a lot, which is probably why I have quite a few songs written from the point of view of a male. . . . Sometimes I have a concept. I seem to wonder a lot about death, and I also mention food a lot. I love to eat. Sometimes words just come together phonetically." ("Crispy crispy Benjamin Franklin" springs to mind. There's only a trace of an accent in Spektor's voice. Born in Moscow, she immigrated to the Bronx at age 9, mainly for religious reasons.

"It's very anti-Semitic," Spektor says. "Every Jewish person's passport is marked, and as soon as Gorbachev said we could apply for visas to go to Israel or America my parents said 'No way our kid is going to grow up in this.' "

Her mother taught music history; her father was a violinist as well as a photographer, but when the Spektors crossed the ocean they had to leave their piano behind; it was considered Soviet property. Regina, who'd studied since she was 6, practiced for a year on windowsills and tabletops. She discovered an out-of-tune upright in the local synagogue.

Thanks to a fortuitous meeting on a subway train, Spektor began taking lessons from Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, while attending yeshiva. Spektor was so focused on perfecting her Chopin that the idea of writing a song didn't occur to her until her senior year, but then the floodgates opened.

While at college at SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music, Spektor started playing local gigs. She sold a homemade CD at coffeehouses and, after moving back to New York City, began frequenting open-mike events while working day jobs as a medical secretary and as an assistant to a private investigator. As her songs became "weirder and darker" and as Spektor became more serious about a life in music, she moved back in with her parents to save money, and became a fixture on the anti-folk scene, supporting such artists as David Poe, Ed Harcourt, and the Dismemberment Plan. She made another CD, called "Songs."

Then she met Raphael, who financed her album because "we had a good feeling something would happen."

He hired a string section and the punk band Kill Kenada to play on "Soviet Kitsch" a clue to the idiosyncratic nature of this collection, which includes such titles as "Ode to Divorce," "Carbon Monoxide," and "Chemo Limo." Track seven, "* * *," is a whispered exchange between the artist and her brother. Her characters are so vividly drawn that when he heard "Chemo Limo," Raphael didn't doubt that Spektor had four children and cancer.

His influence extended past the making of the album. On a lark, late one night during sessions for the Strokes sophomore CD "Room on Fire," Raphael played one of Spektor's songs for the band's singer and songwriter, Julian Casablancas. Casablancas asked for a CD to take home that night. The next morning he came into the studio, put his arms around Raphael, and sang one of her songs into his ear. Casablancas invited Spektor to join the band in the studio for "Modern Girls & Old Fashioned Men," a B-side to the "Reptilia" single, and despite the rather glaring aesthetic differences the Strokes took Spektor out as opening act on their North American tour. That's when the labels came calling.

"It may not be logical," Spektor says of her musical love match with the swaggering modern rock band. "But their music was immediate and beautiful to me. Julian was drawn to mine. A classical violinist can walk into a jazz show and adore it. Still, I don't know what's to come for me. It's a hits world and sometimes smaller things can get lost in the bigger picture. But for every million people that follow the hit song, there are fifty people who want music that will stay with them through their life."

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Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.