regina+spektor

Regina Spektor is a Soviet-born American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered on New York City's East Village.

Early life Spektor was born in Moscow, USSR to a musical Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, is a photographer and amateur violinist. Her mother, Bella Spektor, was a music professor in a Russian college of music and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.

Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather.[2] She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Regina had to leave her piano behind.[3] The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination which Jews faced.

Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the family settled in the Bronx, New York, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a Jewish day middle school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She then attended high school for two years at the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, but transferred to a public school, Fair Lawn High School, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last two years of her high school education.

Beginnings as a songwriter In New York, Spektor studied classical piano with Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, until she was 17; Spektor's father had met Vargas through her husband, violinist Samuel Marder.[6] Although the family had been unable to bring their piano from Russia, Spektor found a piano on which to play in the basement of her synagogue, and also practiced on tabletops and other hard surfaces

Spektor was originally interested only in classical music, but later became interested in hip hop, rock and punk as well. Although she had always made up songs around the house, Spektor first became interested in more formal songwriting during a visit to Israel with the Nesiya Institute in her teenage years when she attracted attention from the other children on the trip for the songs she made up while hiking and realized she had an aptitude for songwriting

Following this trip, she was exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, and other singer-songwriters, which encouraged her belief that she could create her own songs. She wrote her first a cappella songs around age sixteen and her first songs for voice and piano when she was nearly eighteen

Spektor completed the four-year studio composition program of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College within three years, graduating with honors in 2001. Around this time, she also worked briefly at a butterfly farm in Luck, Wisconsin, and studied in Tottenham, England for one semester.

She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, most importantly at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe, but also at the Living Room, Tonic, Fez, the Knitting Factory, and CB's Gallery.[2] She also performed at local colleges (such as Sarah Lawrence College) with other musicians, including the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. She sold self-published CDs at her performances during this period: 11:11 (2001) and Songs (2002). In 2004, she signed a contract with Warner Brothers' record label Sire Records to publish and distribute her third album Soviet Kitsch, originally self-released in 2003. Style

Regina Spektor in concert, April 2007.Spektor has said that she has created a great number of songs,[7] but that she rarely writes any of them down. She has also stated that she never aspired to write songs herself, but songs seem to just flow to her.[8] Spektor's songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination.[4][9] Her songs show influences from folk,[10][11] punk, rock, Jewish,[9][12] Russian,[9] hip hop,[10][13][14] jazz,[10][13] and classical music.[9][13] Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole

Spektor has a broad vocal range and uses the full extent of it. She also explores a variety of different and somewhat unorthodox vocal techniques, such as verses composed entirely of buzzing noises made with the lips and beatbox-style flourishes in the middle of ballads, and also makes use of such unusual musical techniques as using a drum stick to tap rhythms on the body of the piano or chair.[4][15] Part of her style also results from the exaggeration of certain aspects of vocalization, most notably the glottal stop, which is prominent in the single "Fidelity". She also uses a strong New York accent on some words, which she has said is due to her love of New York and its culture.

Her lyrics are equally eclectic, often taking the form of abstract narratives or first-person character studies, similar to short stories or vignettes put to song.[1][15] Spektor usually sings in English, though she sometimes includes a few words or verses of Latin, Russian, French, and other languages in her songs. She also plays with pronunciations, which she said on a NPR interview to be a remnant of her early years when she listened to pop in English without understanding the lyrics. Some of Spektor's lyrics include literary allusions,[4] such as to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in "Poor Little Rich Boy", The Little Prince in "Baobabs", Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood in "Paris", Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare in "Pound of Flesh", Shakespeare's Hamlet in "The Virgin Queen", Boris Pasternak in "Après Moi", Samson and Delilah in "Samson", and Oedipus the King in "Oedipus", Billie Holiday in "Lady" and Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome in "2.99 cent blues". She alludes to The Beatles and Paul McCartney in the song "Edit". She also used a line from Joni Mitchell's California in her song "The Devil Came to Bethlehem". Recurring themes and topics in Spektor's lyrics include love, death, religion (particularly Biblical and Jewish references), city life (particularly New York references), and certain key phrases have been known to recur in different songs by Spektor, such as references to gravediggers, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the name "Mary Ann". Spektor's use of satire is evident in "Wasteside," which refers to the classic satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov The Twelve Chairs, and describes the town in which people are born, get their hair cut, and then are sent to the cemetery.

Performances

Spektor at her first performance in Tel Aviv, Israel on March 3, 2007Spektor's first nationwide tour was accompanying The Strokes as the opening act on their 2003–2004 Room on Fire tour, during which she and the band performed and recorded "Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men". Kings of Leon were the second opening act on that tour, and they invited Regina to open for them on their own European tour right after The Strokes tour. In June 2005, Spektor was the opening act for the English piano rock band Keane on their North American tour, during which she performed at Radio City Music Hall on June 7, 2005.[18] During her 2006 headlining tour in support of the Begin to Hope album, Spektor sold out a performance at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, and two shows at Town Hall Theater in New York City on September 27 and September 28, 2006.[19]

Spektor has appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (once), Late Night with Conan O'Brien (three times), The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (twice), Jimmy Kimmel Live (twice), Last Call with Carson Daly (five times), Late Show with David Letterman, CBS News Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, Australia's Rove Live, and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (once).On October 10, 2009 she performed on Saturday Night Live.

Since January 2005, Spektor has performed on a bright red Baldwin baby grand piano.[21] She plays a seafoam Epiphone Wildkat archtop hollow-body electric guitar.

Although she generally only performs original material, Spektor occasionally performs covers. Most famous of these covers were her performances of songs by Leonard Cohen and Madonna, for the 2nd Annual Jewish Music & Heritage Festival at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.[4] In 2006 and 2007, Spektor embarked on a headlining tour of the U.S. and Europe, selling out numerous clubs and theaters.[citation needed] She covered John Lennon's "Real Love" at the performance arts center of her alma mater, State University of New York at Purchase, on March 28, 2007, at a benefit concert for the Conservatory of Music.[23] In 2007, Spektor recorded "Real Love" for the Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur CD, which was released in June of that year. She recorded a version of the song for Triple J's Like a Version radio segment which was shown on jTV.media type="youtube" key="SGTDRztaCCw" height="344" width="425"

Fidelity lyrics

(Shake it up)

I never loved nobody fully Always one foot on the ground And by protecting my heart truly I got lost in the sounds I hear in my mind All these voices I hear in my mind all these words I hear in my mind all this music

And it breaks my heart And it breaks my heart And it breaks my heart It breaks my heart

And suppose I never met you Suppose we never fell in love Suppose I never ever let you kiss me so sweet and so soft Suppose I never ever saw you Suppose we never ever called Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my own fall Just to break my fall Just to break my fall Break my fall Break my fall

All my friends say that of course its gonna get better Gonna get better Better better better better Better better better

I never love nobody fully Always one foot on the ground And by protecting my heart truly I got lost In the sounds I hear in my mind All these voices I hear in my mind all these words I hear in my mind All this music And it breaks my heart It breaks my heart Breaks my Heart Breaks my heart

The song is about crap and love and music and stuff. and about that she doesent love nobody fully, just a little bit, she never lets herself fly, always one foot on the ground you know. and its gonna get better, and its a lot of noise in her head. and she sings about if she never met the person she fell in love with it would be different, just to break her own fall. she got lost in her own head with all off the noise and words.