Regina Spektor has put out the welcome mat with her new album “Home, before and after,” bringing listeners back into her beautifully constructed web of narrative songs that are whimsically poetic while also emotionally haunting. It’s her first album in six years, after a pause that welcomed her second child with musician husband Jack Dishel, saw her debut on Broadway, and of course contended with the pandemic shutdowns.
While some may remember Spektor from her piano pop panache on early tracks like “Fidelity” and “Samson,” or even for writing the barreling theme for the Netflix hit “Orange is the New Black,” her latest material will go down as some of her best.
The new album’s lead in, “Becoming All Alone,” is a layered orchestral opus that is tempered by her unmistakable lyrical charm: “When I heard God call out my name, he said hey let’s grab a beer … We didn’t even have to pay ‘cause God is God and he’s revered.” Another track, “Up The Mountain” is a textured avant garde piece mixing spoken word, repetition, dancey beats and a chorus of strings. Listening to “Through A Door” can’t happen without tears.
Spektor is hitting the road in support of the album, the tour kicking off Oct. 9 at the Chicago Theatre, and when she hops on the phone to discuss the show, she’s in the midst of some serious tour prep.
“I’m frazzled by how soon I’m leaving for tour and how much I have to get done. I have a time management problem; by the time I’m 80 maybe I’ll figure it out,” she jokes. “It’s been like that for my whole life. I’m a very typical, very un-special procrastinator.”
The way she talks, you can hear the cogs working in Spektor’s head. She talks like she writes her songs, full of analogies and metaphors and the most beautiful stringing of words like one long party streamer. It makes you hope she someday decides to write a book.
“It’s funny you say that, I have on and off throughout my life thought about it,” Spektor says when pressed about the book idea. “Music keeps being my first love, so when I have that time to give, I give it to the albums like this new one.”
Released in June, “Home, before and after” took on more meaning for Spektor with events that have followed the initial writing of the album’s 10 tracks. There was the invasion of Ukraine by Russia — the 42-year-old, Moscow-born singer/songwriter has family in both countries.
Then there was the passing of her father, Ilya, her consummate cheerleader, in April, the same week Spektor was set to play a comeback show at Carnegie Hall. She chokes up speaking about him now and noting the difficulty of celebrating the recent Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur without him.
One silver lining has been putting together a series of snippets called “Papa’s Bootlegs” as part of a 20th anniversary limited-edition box set to celebrate her debut, 2001’s “11:11.” Unbeknown to Spektor, her father recorded her on his camcorder at that time and gave it to his daughter before he passed.
“I was in trouble because I realized there was nothing from the era. Nobody had cellphones and nobody took pictures. We just kind of lived with the pleasure of being in the moment. So I was so grateful when he said, ‘Oh, I filmed some of those early shows,’ and gave us a hard drive with digitized versions of those little camcorder tapes,” Spektor says.
Early in her career playing New York bars, Spektor was introduced to producer Gordon Raphael who played her demos for The Strokes. They took her out on tour and the rest is history.
Spektor’s “Home, before” was in Moscow, where she lived until she was 9-years-old when her family emigrated to the U.S. as religious and political refugees.
“My parents didn’t want to leave initially because I loved the piano so much and they knew we wouldn’t have a piano [in America] or a [piano] teacher,” she explains.
Spektor eventually found a teacher who gave her free lessons for a decade. She plans to one day make a film about her teacher’s husband — a trained violinist and Holocaust concentration camp survivor.
“I just feel like all we can do at times like these is to share stories as much as you can,” Spektor says. “My songs, they don’t come from the world of consciousness, but I do have such a strong desire to share these real-life things I feel strongly about. Hopefully I will find some way.”
