2009-06-21 The New York Times

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New Angles For a Woman Of Many Sides

By ALAN LIGHT

[...]

She arrived at the building on a drizzly afternoon in June, just back from a promotional tour in Europe, where she took 16 flights in 8 days. She seemed com- forted by the sights of her hometown. Ar- riving at the observation deck, she actu- ally said, "Wow — the Statue of Liberty!"

For an hour or so she gleefully picked out landmarks, until the rain drove her in- side. Taking one final glance through the windows, she said, "It's just nice being able to look around and see things from a new angle."

[...]

Ms. Spektor enjoyed a new kind of ex- posure when the tough yet vulnerable love song "Fidelity," from "Begin to Hope," was used in an online video by the Courage Campaign, in protest of last year's Propo- sition 8 vote rejecting gay marriage in Cali- fornia. [...]

Rick Jacobs, the founder and chairman of the Courage Campaign, called "Fidelity" the anthem of the movement. "Minds are changed through storytelling," he said, "and Regina's song is a great story." Ms. Spektor said that she considers opposition to gay marriage "as embarrassing as white-only drinking fountains," and that the video is "the nicest use of my song ever."

[...]

"I've always been fascinated with faith and religions," Ms. Spektor said over cof- fee in a Gramercy Park restaurant, a few weeks before the visit to the Empire State Building. "Sometimes I'm sarcastic about it, and sometimes I'm in awe. Sometimes I feel very connected, and sometimes I feel angry at it. I don't have a stance or a mani- festo about any of it, but I'm perpetually looking at it differently, like a kaleido- scope."

In person Ms. Spektor often comes off like someone who lives in her own world. She remains close to her family and seems overwhelmed by the machinery of her ca- reer. Though she is a notorious perfection- ist with her work, she sometimes gives the sense that being a recording artist just kind of happened to her. ("My world is so weird," she said breathlessly while rushing to an appointment.)

Asked about the new album's title, she responded with typical expansiveness: "I've been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realizations how little we are, how far we are from ev- erything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust?"

[...]

"I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write," she said. "My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room."

With "Far" Ms. Spektor worked with four different pro- ducers and ventured into studios outside of New York for the first time. "I wanted a master class situation," she said. "It hit me that I'm not going to get to make a record every half a year, so I might as well work with a lot of people when I do."

[...]

Ms. Spektor thought for a minute when this was pointed out then said that while the shift wasn't intentional, it seemed logical. "Maybe I am skipping over the city and going from very personal things to the world, from internal experience to giant, far-away-from-space ex- perience," she said. "Maybe it's because I haven't been in the city so much because I've been trav- eling and on the road. Also, I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I've seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don't know anymore if this is the awesomest way to live.

"I really thought it was the only way to live. I grew up in apartments, you know? I still get freaked out just being in houses."