2006-01-05 The Guardian

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[...]

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