She's Goth The Look

Regina Spektor has a reputation for kookiness and she is determined to live up to it. She floats into the room, artfully bedraggled, streaks of black eyeliner emphasising the disconcerting lustre of her gaze.

“Ohmygawd,” gasps Spektor, her New York twang offering just a hint of her Russian upbringing. "I love this place.”
She is referring to an elegantly surreal wing of Dublin’s Morrison Hotel, where the fixtures appear vaguely out of proportion and over which a nightmarish Pinocchio statue grotesquely looms.
The room reeks of gothic whimsy; it suggests Jasper Conran collaborating with HP Lovecraft. Spektor, whose weirdly morbid torch songs are in much the same vein, feels right at home.
“Wow,” she continues, gazing over the interviewer’s shoulder at Evil Pinocchio. “I am totally in love with all of this. It’s so...so dreamy.”
To listen to her, Spektor, who is squeaky and looks at least half a decade younger than her 25 years, might seem a precocious flake. Her conversation is scattershot; she employs overwrought metaphors and occasionally sounds as though she is quoting chunks of stream of consciousness prose.
Yet she is an artist with her eyes on the prize. Last year Spektor collaborated with The Strokes, with whom she has struck up a profitable friendship. And her songs – or at least the recent ones – aren’t nearly as far out as you may have been led to think.
True, Spektor started out in quirky hole-in-the-wall clubs on the Lower East Side, mingling with such bedroom beatniks as Jeffrey Lewis and Kimya Dawson. Outsiders dubbed their ditzy clique ‘anti-folk’; the music they made often felt like a cross between experimental comedy and acoustic rock.
But Spektor’s instincts, honed by classical training, are too restless and eclectic to be pigeonholed; her albums (in the US she is already on her fourth) incorporate Tori Amos-tinged piano bar melancholy, Weimar cabaret and jazz improvisation.
Growing up in a Bronx community of Russian ex-pats, Spektor says she soaked up New York’s rich jumble of ethnic influences. When she first arrived in the US with her family, she couldn't even speak English. Her parents, Russian-Jewish academics, had left their homeland in the first flush of Glasnost, fleeing the endemic anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union.
“You were literally a second class citizen,” says Spektor. “As a Jew you could never be Russian. It said it, right there on your passport. You were different. You didn’t belong.”
As a child in Russia, her father used to play her The Beatles, the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd; her first memories of English are of a musical language.
“I used to sing to records and not understand the English words, so I would pronounce them really British,” she smiles. “In America it took me a while to learn English. I realised that I was just speaking ridiculous sounds. Suddenly the words started to mean things. I cracked the code.”
Musicians in underground rock and the anti-folk scene tend to be painfully modest. Spektor, though, is unapologetic about her ambitions.
“The people I look up to are unattainable,” she avers, “like the Beatles and the Bob Dylans and the Mozarts and the Chopins and the Bachs of the world.
“I just think there shouldn’t be a song I can’t write, ever, in any milieu. If, tomorrow morning, I wanted to try a country song, something in the vein of Bob Dylan, they why shouldn’t I? I refuse to be constrained by other people’s idea of what I should be. ”
Spektor’s lyrics shy away from the confessional; her songs weave dark little tales. ‘Poor Little Rich Boy’, a stand-out from her 2000 debut, 11:11, pictures a lonely young man, prematurely gloomy, arriving at a party on his own. "You’re so young,” Ms. Spektor chides him 20 times, beating out a staccato rhythm on a chair.
“I like telling stories,” she says. “To me, that's far more interesting than baring my soul. The songs aren’t about me. You can’t find me in there.”
Of her friendship with The Strokes (their collaboration, 'Modern Girls And Old Fashioned Men', is a high point in the band’s songbook), she is uncharacteristically demure.
“Well, I was just the biggest Strokes fan in the world. And then they asked me to come on tour with them. It was amazing for me. I got to see 15 Strokes shows in a row. There was nothing in it for them. I was operating in a totally different genre; I wasn’t going to sell more tickets to their concerts. They just liked what I did.”