What kind of artist is regina spektor

It's easy to romanticise it on a social level. There were positives that came out of it. Someone could grow up in absolute poverty and be very close to their family and they'd be very good people, but you can't romanticise it. It's not fair to romanticise it. We meet just after Putin has reclaimed the presidency in Russia. It's sad.

Our world is so full of brilliant people but they just don't get to be there for the most part," she says. Spektor is a newlywed, but of her recent marriage to Moldy Peaches guitarist Jack Dishel she won't say anything; and nor, understandably, is she keen to discuss the drowning of her cellist Daniel Cho in Lake Geneva the day before she played the Montreux jazz festival in , or the recent death of another close friend.

But she does say, turning hushed and sounding understandably uncomfortable: "I'm definitely in the club of people who have experienced great tragedy in their life. Nothing bad had ever really happened to me but now I'm in this club — and it's a really big club. I don't think I was prepared for the level of pain I've been experiencing in the last few years. As you go through life you try to take all the things that come your way and process them with as much strength and kindness as you can muster.

Obviously it transforms you as a person, but I don't think it's necessarily a final definition. It's that question of definition that leads to the discussion of her work, and the impossibility of pinning too much biographical fact on the shifting surface of her frequently dazzling songs. This is someone who says her favourite novel, "a constant source of inspiration", is Pushkin's Eugene Onegin — but at the moment she's lapping up Bossypants , the essentially autobiographical book of comedian Tina Fey.

It's a very Regina Spektor combination. Concluding, she adds, not pausing for breath: "I still feel that art comes from a bigger place than just your own experiences and your own daily struggles or thoughts. A lot of it comes from a place of feeling rather than conscious thought. Caspar Llewellyn Smith. For the languid Carbon Monoxide she took the role of a doped-out, possibly suicidal New York hipster doing uncanny impressions of Fozzie Bear.

Best of all, Us was an exhilarating chamber-pop toboggan ride, Spektor so lost in a new romance she imagines statues erected and cities renamed in its honour. You had to be welded to the floor not to be swept away. Her every tempo shift jolted us down winding diversions into street fights Your Honor , cancer treatments Chemo Limo and Dickensian ghosts telling businessmen to embrace life by licking rocks and going around shoeless Ghost of Corporate Future.

It also framed some of her most moving balladry in Field Below, a rerecorded orchestral Samson and gossamer spiritual Summer in the City, a tear-jerking study of the faltering steps one takes out of Dumpsville. Not very weep-worthy, frottage. Yet this was a prime example of her talent for injecting real human failings, perversions and eccentricities into the gentlest of lovelorn ballads, and sneaking a bug into the collective subconscious has only seen her cult star ascend.

She toured the record for three years, declining Sire's offer of mainstream promotion in favour of building a fanbase organically. Her latest album, Remember Us To Life, comes after a break of four years, during which time she married fellow musician Jack Dishel and had her first child.

For the first time, Spektor wrote the album from scratch "these songs just seemed to want to be together," she says and, sure enough, it has a sonic and thematic coherence that is often absent from her earlier work. We're pretty much run by our subconscious. She acknowledges that some of the lyrics are probably a delayed response to grief - after one of her closest friends died in a plane crash, and her cellist, Daniel Cho, drowned in Lake Geneva the day before she played the Montreux Jazz Festival in But, she stresses, the music doesn't have to be depressing.

I feel very comforted by beauty, especially when it overwhelms you with all its colours and sounds. Sometimes it helps you not think, sometimes it helps you think more clearly, sometimes it helps you pull yourself out of a dark place, sometimes you want it to pull you into the dark place.

One person who draws heavily on Spektor's music is screenwriter Jenji Kohan, who " listened to Regina's albums obsessively " while writing the first series of Orange Is The New Black.

Once the show went into production, she contacted Spektor and asked her to write the theme tune, You've Got Time.

She loved it so much the song plays for more than a minute - uncommonly long for a TV show - at the start of every episode. I was actually hoping that she might.

And she said no - because they have such a giant cast that they need all that time to put the names up there! Spektor's word-of-mouth success. Image source, Shervin Lainez.