ReginaSpektor.net is an old fan site dedicated to the music of Regina Spektor. This site is in no way affiliated with Regina, her management, or her record company.
It's been a long time coming, and now far is close enough that we can almost taste it. You can read more about it, download two tracks from iTunes, download a third track when you pre-order your special edition CD+DVD+lithograph from WBR, or just watch the videos below repeatedly to whet your appetite...
Laughing With Official Video
Dance Anthem of the 80s "Viral" Video
And another nail for your heart...
TOC: Is that why your album title is so short?Regina Spektor: I was originally calling it Far, Far Away, and I kept chopping it down.
TOC: Sounds a little fantasy sci-fi. What’s the thought behind the name?
Regina Spektor: One day it hit me, that I was standing on a planet, rotating in space. I could feel the Earth spinning beneath my feet; I could feel that we are just shooting through space, and everything else is so far away. And if you travel far, you leave something far behind. It was one of those deep moments, like when you realize you’re going to die.
TOC: Yeah, that’s a big one.
Regina Spektor: But lately I’ve been calling the album Fart.
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One of my favorite songs is “Blue Lips,” a slow building tune with lyrics about all things blue. Can you tell me what that song is about?[...]Well, that’s really hard for me. I don’t really think of songs in those terms. I don’t sit down with an agenda and go, “I’m going to write a song about…” you know? I just start playing a little bit on the piano, and then I start singing a little bit, and then it’s over — and there’s a song. Sometimes, very rarely, I can trace the ancestry of a lyric, and I’ll be like, “Oh, it’s a combination of that person I saw in the street and that one painting I saw in a museum, and that one movie I saw,” or something like that. But for the most part, it’s not really clear even to me. People think that if you can’t explain a linear meaning, then the song’s meaningless, or that you just put words together because they sound nice. But it’s not that either. It feels completely meaningful — it all means very exact stuff. I even feel like it’s super important to use “a” instead of “the” in some songs, you know? I’ll be moving tiny little things around in my mouth, and then I’ll get them just right and it sort of freezes — and that’s fate.
On “Folding Chairs,” you bark like a dolphin.[...]I love making noises. It comes out of the fact that when I started writing songs, I loved Radiohead, Tom Waits, and the Beatles, and they all have these sounds, these clangs. But in my early stuff, and especially my performances, it was really limited to just me and a piano. I have this natural desire to just climb out of my skin and become five people making noises, orchestrating all these parts together. I could have just sampled a dolphin, but barking is so much more fun to do.
The album is definitely all over the place. But compared to your other records, it feels more upbeat. What’s making you so happy these days?It’s so funny that you’re saying that, because I was like, “is this the heaviest record I’ve ever made?” I have no grip on reality. I’m so non-objective. Ah, the world is sooooooooo cool. Some of the songs are older than those on [2006’s] Begin to Hope, and some songs that are older than [2004’s] Soviet Kitsch. I have so many songs and I just try to collect them all, and glue them all together. And they span eight years. Some were written two weeks before the end of recording the album, and some were written eight, or five, or three years ago. It’s funny when someone will say something like, ‘Oh, you sound like you’ve grown so much, you’ve matured so much musically,” then reference a certain song I wrote when I was 18. Hey, maybe I was more mature then.
Did you have a different mindset going into record this album than the last one?Some of the mindset was the same, which is always the same: Just a really strong spirit of adventure hits me, and I become a little explorer person. I've got my backpack, I've got my water bottle, and I'm off to f--ing god knows where -- the desert, the mountains, the sea, touching everything, trying everything, following tangents and really just being in complete mad scientist mode. That's always the same, I think. But it gets more and more so with each record. I started out being a real purist. In the beginning, I was like, Records are only real records if they’re done all in one live take. Slowly, I was like, Well, I don't know if that's true. A lot of the records that I love aren't done that way. I think with this one I was letting go of trying to control everything, and trying to let things happen. Though I'm sure if you talk to some people they'll be like, "She’s a crazy perfectionist." But I'm less of a crazy perfectionist than I was a little while ago. [Pauses] Well, I'm still a crazy perfectionist, but I'll try more things without being like, "No, I can't do that."
