In Conversation

Regina Spektor on Living in the Space Between Pain and Hope

Her forthcoming release Home, before and after, finds the singer-songwriter ruminating on everything from romance to having a beer with God.
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By Shervin Lainez.

Regina Spektor has been busy the past few years. She wrote and recorded the theme song for Orange Is the New Black. She played an elaborate weeklong residency in a Broadway theater, with guest stars including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Amanda Palmer. Oh, and she gave birth to her second child.

Yet somehow it has been six years since the release of Spektor’s previous studio album, Remember Us to Life, a gap that ends June 24 with the arrival of the magnificent Home, before and after. She will then head out on a tour that includes eight dates with Norah Jones and one night at Carnegie Hall. First, though, Spektor spoke with Vanity Fair about why she writes about love and loss, “the little things in life.”

Vanity Fair: You’ve made a terrific album.

Regina Spektor: Well, thank you for listening to it. You work on something and you’re so inside of it, and then afterwards, I usually tend to have this kind of plummeting feeling, like, are these even songs?

Your songs are always sonically rich, but on the new album your use of an orchestra adds a new dimension, a lushness that’s sometimes dark, sometimes danceable. Was that the goal?

There are toys you can play with in a studio to make things sound very atmospheric, very vibey. And I love to listen to it. But the words that I’m trying to say, they’re so important to me. Whenever I feel like I’m peering at the words through a veil I’m, like, suffering. The thing I was really trying to do is not have the orchestra sound like movie music, but still be lush.

Artists have all sorts of methods to generate inspiration or heighten the emotional level of their material. But getting pregnant in order to record, that’s a remarkable level of commitment.

Could you imagine? I would never have any records, if that’s what it took. The songs were all written before, most of them. But I had never experienced recording while pregnant. And that was really a trip. Usually, ideally, when I play you’re just in a state of getting lost, of just being. Now you go to draw a breath and there’s somebody sitting on your lungs. But it was also kind of nice, because I work as a loner in a lot of ways. It’s been a real learning experience for me to even work with producers because I like to do everything myself. And here I was never alone. It was really wonderful because there were always surprises, especially in the later months: Oh, you’re hiccupping for three hours straight!

It’s just like this hilarious double life. You’re glueing yourself together with Wite-Out and Scotch tape behind the scenes and you’re supposed to appear all put together and make sense. Nobody really cares that the baby was awake at 11 p.m. and 12 p.m. and 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. That’s where I’m at. I’m talking to you, but my kid just doesn’t sleep. I ask people for advice and they’re like, “Well, I didn’t sleep for eight years.” That’s not a good solution!

Adding to the degree of difficulty, you made the record during the pandemic, with the players scattered across multiple time zones and you recording the piano and vocals by yourself in a former church in Woodstock, New York.

It’s funny. I was the most alone and the least alone at the same time, because I had this other little person inside me.

Later, after I had given birth, we were recording an orchestra remotely, and they were in Macedonia. I was in New York and John Congleton, the producer, and Jherek Bischoff, the arranger, were in California. On the very first day of this remote recording there was an earthquake in Macedonia, and the entire place shook and went dark. They called us back and were like, “We’re used to this. It’s okay.” I had a very, very long cord to my headphones and I would turn off my camera and breastfeed. Because you can’t stop an orchestral session.

The songs include a tense kept-woman drama (“Sugar Man”), a sexy quest (“Up the Mountain”), and a grand impressionistic suite (“Loveology”). Do you feel like this record has a theme?

Oh, I feel like each song is a connective idea within itself. A little world. They were written at different times—there’s a couple of really old songs on here. “Loveology” and “Raindrops” are very, very old, “Raindrops” maybe 20 years. I love songs, and I put them together where it feels like they’re contrasting each other or they’re helping each other. But as far as understanding whether something pieces together or has an overarching message, I think all of that has to be in the power of the listener.

There’s also the achingly beautiful and sad and funny “Becoming All Alone Again,” where you and God go out for a beer. He pays.

The songs are all made up! A lot of the time my mind is basically, “Oh, what’s kind of cool?” They’re like little balloons, and I just grab a string and float off. The thing that’s most interesting to me is that it’s a kaleidoscope. It’s always shifting. My idea of God will be probably 30 different ideas of God in songs. But my ideas in songs are hopefully higher and maybe more clear ideas than I have consciously. I’m pulling at this thread and maybe something comes out that I don’t even fully understand. It’s been pointed out that I revisit certain things in songs. Death. God. The little things in life.

Did your weeklong Broadway run in 2019 reshape your music in any way?

One night when Ben Folds was my special guest, we did a jazz standard together. That afternoon Ben and I said to Caleb Teicher, the tap dancer, “Can you please do a creative solo for the little instrumental section?” They got an umbrella and did all these cool moves and worked it out. And then it just happened that night on Broadway, something that didn’t exist before. I come from classical music, and I have tried so hard to let go of some of that perfectionism. I used to just beat myself up and be like, you know, this isn’t ready. The Broadway thing was really freeing. That was a very big deal to me. 

I love that the recorded version of “Spacetime Fairytale” includes tap, as the song did in its Broadway version.

When you’re playing with musicians live, we all listen to each other and you find musicians that feel time together. Music breathes. Things speed up, things slow down, especially in music like mine. When you’re recording in different places that creates real difficulties: Can we just figure out disembodied tap and put it here? Caleb did an amazing job of tapping to the track I sent him. I think “Spacetime” is always going to be a huge thing for me.

Your family moved from Moscow to the Bronx when you were nine years old. So you’re thoroughly American. But is this a particularly complicated time to also be Russian?

It’s a devastating time to be from there. My heart is breaking for this fucking war. It’s incomprehensible. I grew up thinking that World War II had just happened. Because in Russia it did—every single person there was affected, every single person knew personally family members, relatives, distant and close friends who were wounded, killed, starved. I have 42 family members that were buried alive in the roads of Ukraine. My grandparents are from Zhytomyr, which is right next to Kiev. During Chernobyl our friend from Kiev and her son came and lived with us in Moscow. To start a war, in this age, with these weapons, it’s unconscionable. I can’t believe this is happening in our time, with people who are basically all siblings.

I was very sorry to hear of the death of your father, Ilya, in early April.

I’m kind of starting to realize it will not get better. It may feel a little different, but it won’t get better.

You lost him shortly before you were scheduled to play at Carnegie Hall. Was there any part of you that wanted to go through with the show as a tribute to your father? 

It was very difficult for me to cancel because it had been something that he was so looking forward to. He was sick and he was always sending me away, “You should be practicing!” I only decided to cancel when it became Jewish-mathematically impossible. The show would have been on the last day of shiva. There would have been nothing I could have done but walk out on that stage and weep. I’m trying to strengthen myself so when I go there next month I can really play a show in his memory and hold it together. I’m a raw person in general, and with everything going on in the world and in my world—I just want to make these shows a celebration, to be alive together.

To me that’s the brilliance of your new album, that it’s about the tension between pain and hope.

That’s where I live. Whatever it is that’s going on here, we really don’t understand what it is or why anything happens. I’m always very suspicious of everyone who thinks they have something figured out. I’m developing a higher tolerance for the mystery of it all. To really understand that as terrible as things can get in this place, that’s also as good as they can get. Pain and hope truly come together. Knowing how much beauty and grace we can experience at times, that’s how dark and despairing it can also be. My whole entire attempt is to intertwine them into a fabric so they can temper each other. Because floating into each without the other is kind of vapid.

I truly do believe that there’s still a place for nuance. That place is probably face-to-face or voice-to-voice, not in sound bites or tiny quotes. And our world seems to be going towards tinier and tinier pieces. You know, maybe my next record is just going to be 50 TikToks and 12 ringtones.

Please, please, promise me that won’t happen.

[Laughs.] Yeah, no. I’m happy in the world of mystery and subtlety.

This interview has been edited and condensed for context and clarity.