“That’s a type of bravery I feel I’d never have,” Spektor says as she ambles against the crowd. “I always wonder if I’m a frontiersperson. I guess my parents are. I’m the one who gets brought along and everything is made nice for me.”
Indeed, Spektor’s music path wasn’t particularly rocky. After graduating with a music degree from the State University of New York at Purchase in 2001, Spektor developed a following in Manhattan’s determinedly eccentric antifolk scene, playing shows with bands like the Moldy Peaches. She self-released a couple of albums, and for her third, Soviet Kitsch, teamed with Gordon Raphael, who was then producing the Strokes’ Room on Fire. (She won him over with a performance of her song-poem “Poor Little Rich Boy,” playing piano with her left hand and smacking a drum stick on the bench with her right.) Raphael shared
The lady in red (above);
tinkling the ivories at
Austin City Limits, 2007
they asked her to join their U.S. tour. Through them, she met the Kings of Leon, who invited her to open for them in Europe. “I guess it sounds glamorous,” she says, “but it was so spontaneous. I went on tour with no label, no management, nothing.” And though her career was birthed during the early-aughts return-of-rock scene, she avoided its social trappings. “I mean, I’ve been hanging out with you for two days,” she says. “Do I strike you as a scenester?” “YOU’RE JUST SUPPOSED TO
“I think they see her as a career artist, which most labels don’t have,” says David Kahne, who produced Begin to Hope. “They want to have something that they’re proud of, not, ‘We have this single everybody forgot about two weeks later.’ ”
Spektor still lives in New York—though she refers to her parents’ home in the Bronx as “our apartment,” she has her own place in Manhattan that she shares with her longtime boyfriend—but as we pore over photos of idyllic country homes and lush, woodsy settings, she admits that she’s debating moving. “I feel more drawn to nature than ever before,” she says. “I was in Virginia recently and there were so many stars! Here, the sky doesn’t even go black; it’s this hazy gray, full of light.”
Spektor pauses in front of Dorothea Lange’s iconic dustbowl-era shot, Migrant Mother. “ Living like that?” she says, shaking her head. “Wow. So much…worry.” She stares at the photo in silence, takes another step or two, only to stop at another striking image of a woman, this one— Diane Arbus’ portrait of a topless dancer in her
Spektor had written almost all of Far before she entered the studio in June 2008. Instead of working with just one producer like she did on Hope, she decided to divide her songs among four heavyweights: Kahne, Mike Elizondo ( Eminem, Fiona Apple), Garret “Jacknife” Lee (Weezer, R.E.M.), and ELO’s Jeff Lynne, whom Spektor knew of solely through his production work on Tom Petty’s 2006 album, Highway Companion. (Spektor is close friends with Petty’s daughter Adria, a director who did all the videos for Far.) Spektor had no idea that Lynne had written “Mr. Blue Sky,” produced George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, or was a member of the Traveling Wilburys.
In fact, she intentionally didn’t bone up on his résumé before heading into his Los Angeles home studio to record. “Isn’t it kind of weird to have someone show up who’s like, ‘In your 1972 interview, you said blah blah blah,’ and, ‘I know you like this microphone because that’s what your Wikipedia page said.’ I would think it’s the biggest compliment ever if somebody liked me for the latest thing I did after a long career of doing awesome shit.”
Lynne was equally impressed by what he heard from Spektor. “She is certainly up there with all the real talents,” Lynne says via e-mail. “I think her music is very clever, strange, and beautiful.”
dingy San Francisco dressing room—displays an entirely different kind of hopelessness. “That’s the awesome thing about so many of these images—they just sort of hit you, and you don’t even know what they’re doing to you,” Spektor says. “They’re just there in your consciousness.”
Spektor’s songs work a similar kind of alchemy, with oneiric images that spark Freudian message-board analyses months or even years before their release. The music also lives in some dreamlike realm between childhood and maturity: Her singsong, hunt-and-peck melodies give way to bravura concert-pianist runs and arpeggiated flights of vocal fancy, her seemingly nonsensical lyrics revealing emotional richness.
Over chicken salad in the museum’s terrace café, Spektor explains that, like the art we’ve been observing, her songs aren’t easily dissectible. “You’re just supposed to let them take you on a trip,” she says. “If they’re good for you, you’ll experience some sort of liftoff. That’s all. It
From the buoyant Lynne-produced “Folding Chair” (which borrows the bass melody from that grade-school piano classic “Heart and Soul”) to the Jack-nife-produced single “Laughing With,” a rumination on people’s perception of God, the album feels like one complete thought rather than the work of four different producers. Spektor never worried about it having a cohesive sound—she was most concerned with learning as much as she could from each producer. “I definitely feel changed by all of them. I hear things in a new way,” she says. “You get that spider-sense.”
It’s a funny image, Spektor—petite, smiley, wide-eyed—as superhero. But maybe she’s the kind music needs: a major-label artist who appeals to NPR listeners and Gossip Girl viewers equally. A woman who may be scared of roller coasters and action films, but not of choosing for her first single a song about how funny God is. “People come and go so quickly,” says Kahne. “To see someone develop a loyal fanbase, expecting this level of artistry, that’s really the trick.”
Outside MoMA, Spektor tries to hail a cab, but there are none for the taking. Tourists with Tiffany bags and school groups in matching yellow T-shirts glide past, oblivious to the musical superhero in their midst. “Maybe I’ll just start walking,” she says, casting a glance down Fifth Avenue, “and then it’ll just…happen.”
dOve shOre/getty iMages (live sh Ow)
68 July 2009 / Music stuff! On sPin.cOM! nO kidding!
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