Sound Advice: Poor One Out For Your Broken Teenage Heart

This story is featured in CityBeat’s July 12 print edition.

Regina Spektor was born in 1980 in Moscow, Soviet Union, the year the United States and other countries boycotted the Olympics in her home country. Spurred by Perestroika — a political reform movement allowing Soviet citizens to emigrate elsewhere — Spektor and her family moved to the Bronx when she was 9. By 21, she had 14 years of classical piano studies behind her. Yet a burgeoning interest in jazz, hip-hop and rock influenced her first recorded efforts, eventually leading to her breakthrough album, 2006’s Begin to Hope, a chamber pop charmer powered by her big heart, expressive (but limited) voice, lyrical quirks and melodic piano playing.

Spektor thrives in live settings, whether the stage be a New York City hole in the wall — she got her start playing amid the city’s anti-folk scene in the early aughts — or massive festivals like Coachella or Lollapalooza, which makes her first extended tour in several years behind 2022’s Home, before and after such an enticing proposition. She recorded the album in upstate New York during the heart of the pandemic, aided by the remote work of ace producer John Congleton, who’s collaborated with an avalanche of noted artists, including the like minds of Sharon Van Etten, Laurie Anderson, Angel Olsen and St. Vincent.

“Once I started being able to capture these songs, John was so amazing at working remotely,” Spektor said in a 2022 interview with The Fader. “He was so patient because we worked deeply, and doing it that way, remotely, is tedious. And then we brought Jherek (Bischoff) on to do all these orchestral arrangements, also remotely. There’s that famous quote: ‘Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.’ But we danced about architecture from morning to night, and it actually got us places.”

Much of Home, before and after tackles our current political, physical and psychological strife (perhaps also influenced by her Soviet roots as a persecuted Jew) but it’s never a downer. Spektor’s particular eccentricities and gift for making the grandiose sound intimate can’t help but transport. Take the spare, piano-powered album closer “Through a Door,” which is at once universal and singular as she sings, “Hearts can travel through closed doors/They can wander empty halls/If you let your heart go free/It’ll always come back full.”

Regina Spektor plays the Andrew J Brady Music Center at 8 p.m. July 30. Info: bradymusiccenter.com.

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