2006-01-26 BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour

Interview and live in-studio session ahead of Regina's show at the Manchester Academy 3; previously available to stream from BBC Radio 4 

Real Audio (segment begins at 18:39)

Love Affair

To suffer greatly from the indignity of working for a living

Scanning the racks again, the January 21st issue of NME crowns "Us" as Track of the Week--a given, really, considering that it...

...surely must be the indie love song of the millennium...The way in which she manages to make the hiccoughed glottal stop in the word "contagious" sound like a mini-explosion of emotion is almost worth the asking price alone.

The first single off Soviet Kitsch is now of course drafted back into service as the second single off Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories; the review even notes that the song is "about to blow out the candles on its second birthday cake" (not to be a gossip, but she's actually twice that age...you didn't hear it from me).

Anyway, Mary Ann... is out now on CD, as you probably already know, and the single is out next month, but you can pre-order your vinyl 7" from the men of Transgressive Records right now--apparently with artwork this time, and I must say that, even reduced to 1" square in the pulpy tabloid pages of the New Musical Express, it sure look purrty.

2006-01-21 NME

Mary Ann meets the Gravediggers and other short stories by regina spektor

Oedipus
Love Affair
Poor Little Rich Boy
Sailor Song
Mary Ann
Prisoners
Consequence of Sounds
Daniel Cowman
Lacrimosa
Pavlov’s Daughter
Chemo Limo
Us

This compilation of tracks from 11:11, Songs, and Soviet Kitsch was released in the UK on CD by Transgressive Records in January 2006, accompanied by a re-branded version of the same DVD included in the Sire release of Soviet Kitsch. This release is particularly notable for its evocative artwork by Julie Morstad.

4-track promo CD

I can't imagine why, but I feel like dancing

Crimson hooks it up again, by way of his man on the West Coast, name of Distortion:

26 January 2005, Hotel Cafe, Los Angeles

Pound of Flesh
Carbon Monoxide
"all the rowboats" First (and only? my mind is going) performance of this song
Poor Little Rich Boy
"open"
Bobbing for Apples
That Time
Uh-merica
Fidelity
Prisoners
Reginasaurus

2006-01-05 The Guardian

LINK

[...]

The singer-songwriter arrives with a large cat on her head. "It's fucking cold in your country," she says - then grins, yawns and knocks back a slug of Echinacea.

[...]

We are two players meeting in the middle, one who finds the prospect of classical precision daunting, another who is wary of improvising. The tune we play, Consequence of Sound, has a split-personality, musically and lyrically. [...] One minute Spektor is gabbling, the next she is banging out a mini-opera. It's like being in an orchestra one minute, a playground the next. "I like it!" she says. "I don't ever really get to redo anything like this."

Who would be her perfect jam? "It's a good question. I wanna take it home and think about it." She's a fan of Tom Waits, how about him? "He does seem like the perfect person. The interesting thing about him is that he is an actor. One of my great Russian hero composer-songwriters is Vladimir Vysotsky - he was a great actor, too. In their music the different characters come through. It comes with that long-standing tradition of bards - you know, like Homer? He was a musician. The Odyssey was an improvisation.

"But even in improvisation you train. Like boxing or something. You go through hours and hours of rigorous, mindless repetition, so that in the moment you can forget it all and your body just knows how to react." She goes into a dream again: "You know, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

Does she feel stronger on stage, being her characters? "Of course! On stage, you're smarter than you are, you're faster than you are. It's what all that training is for. It's your job to be a historian of everything that goes on around you. You try to take in as much as you can - it's a very emotional job because you have to keep yourself very open. Then when it fills up to a certain line in your body, it starts spilling over - the output of all that stuff that is processed ..."

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Mary Ann Meets the Grave Diggers and Other Short Stories is out on January 16 on Transgressive. Regina Spektor plays the Glee Club, Birmingham, on January 25, then tours