Bittersweet songs for these strange times
Regina Spektor
‘This is a strange time to meet,” lamented Regina Spektor at Royal Festival Hall, referring to the recent US election. “I’m having a very hard time not to be depressed. After these shows, we’ll be going back to a very different place we left.”
Her soft-spoken, shy-girl demeanour and idiosyncratic chatter can be disarming, but this Russo-American chanteuse has always had plenty of bite. The same could be said of her songs: beneath their twee baroque veneer lie weighty topics such as love, lust, dreams, femininity, the human condition, and even politics, often relayed with acerbic intelligence.
When she first entered the public consciousness in 2004, championed by garage rockers The Strokes, she was lazily pigeonholed in some quarters as a purveyor of quirk, her piano-chinking cutesiness too redolent of Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom. Since then, though, her versatility and the lyrical complexity of her music has shone through, helping her amass a loyal legion of fans, among them Barack Obama, for whom she performed at the White House in 2010.
I wonder what the outgoing President makes of Ballad of a Politician, a sharp vignette in which Spektor likens those who govern to prostitutes. Here, the song from 2012 took on greater relevance. Before that, the 36-year-old opened her set with the bouncy 2006 number On the Radio, which was lent ballast by a well-oiled string quartet and some vigorous drumming. From here, the classically trained pianist sprinkled tracks from her recently released seventh album Remember Us to Life – such as the wallflower ode Bleeding Heart and the Wes Anderson-inspired Grand Hotel – into a career-spanning set.
There was much to cherish: the surging You’ve Got Time (the theme from the Netflix series Orange is the
New Black, for which she received a Grammy nomination), a dolorous cover of Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No 2, and a heart-melting rendition of Us, her chamber-pop paean to a blossoming romance. But the highlight came with
Samson, a bittersweet ballad that homes in on your heart ruthlessly with a series of perfectly turned bons mots.
“You are my sweetest downfall,” she sang, piercing plaintively through tumbling piano chords. Emerging from it unfazed was just about inconceivable.