Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor lived in Russia until she was 91/2, and she misses a lot about it. She titled an album “Soviet Kitsch,” recently covered a folk song by Russian bard Bulat Okudzhava and has spoken rapturously about returning last summer and reconnecting with a beloved music teacher. There is also something she doesn’t miss.
“My dad had some sort of a minor surgery when he was young, and I was just little. In Russia, people didn’t have their own rooms or even a room with two people. What they had was a big room with lots and lots of beds, and that was the hospital,” she recalls. “On those few days he was laying there, he had to listen to crazy amounts of anti-Semitism. And he didn’t say a word, because he didn’t want anybody to know he was Jewish.
“I guess it was, like, a way for people to bond.”
Spektor, 32, who immigrated to the U.S. with her parents in 1989, says she received similar abuse in the mother country.
“I got a lot less of it,” she says by phone from her home in New York City. “It was just a different time, and I also didn’t stay there long enough. But then there’s always little things. Kids would say something stupid, like, ‘Go back to Israel,’ and all kinds of stuff like that. They were probably copying their parents.”
For all this serious business in her background, Spektor’s music is playful, herky-jerky, even childlike. Beginning with 2001’s “11:11,” her albums have the feel of improvisational singer-pianists such as Tori Amos, but she adds unique melodic touches and sound effects. On this year’s “What I Saw From the Cheap Seats,” she does impromptu hip-hop beat-boxing, squeaks made-up nursery rhymes, grunts as if vomiting and, in “Oh Marcello,” quotes from the Animals’ rock classic “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”
“It’s not necessarily a specific thing toward that song or its meaning,” she says during the phone interview. “When I wrote that song, I was in college. I was listening to a lot of jazz and I got into the tradition of quoting certain works within other works. I really loved that. You’d be listening to a certain piece of music, and all of a sudden they’d stick in another piece of music that was totally disparate. It’d make you feel like you were in a joke.
“Even in conversation, so much of human communication happens by referencing things that are familiar — ‘Remember that “Saturday Night Live” thing or that “Simpsons” episode?’ Everybody’s always referencing everything. I think it’s a musical way of doing that,” she continues. “I didn’t know at the time it was a song written by the Animals. I knew the song from Nina Simone’s cover of it. For a long time, I thought she wrote it.”
Spektor’s approach to music is uniquely Russian and American. This can be literal: On “What I Saw,” in addition to referencing an American jazz singer covering an American rock ‘n’ roll band, she covers “The Prayer of Francois Villon (Molitva),” by Okudzhava, the late Russian singer and guitarist who performed songs “unofficially” during the Soviet era and was widely copied and lionized. One of Spektor’s songs, “Laughing With,” a clever 2009 spiritual ballad that begins “No one laughs at God in a hospital,” is playfully written, as usual, but it strikes Russian folklore experts as uniquely weighty.
“It’s a very serious song in a way that seems Russian to me,” says Gabriella Safran, director of Slavic languages and literatures at Stanford University, who has studied Okudzhava and contemporaries such as Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich. “Not because of this thing that ‘Russians are serious,’ but because she’s coming out of this very specific bard tradition. It makes sense to me that that tradition might have been kept alive by Spektor’s parents. That must have been something she knew growing up.”
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Spektor’s mother taught piano at a Moscow conservatory, and her father played violin and took photos professionally. Spektor studied classical piano at age 7 in Russia, then completed a four-year studio-composition program at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in New York. But she soon realized she was better at writing songs than speeding through symphonies. Eventually she started performing her own compositions at New York clubs, opening on one prominent tour for the Strokes.
Spektor’s parents didn’t flinch when Regina abruptly turned away from her conservatory training.
“They’ve always been really supportive of me writing songs,” she says. “Even when the songs were really, really bad. And then I got to a point where I was working all these temp jobs — just sucking the life out of me — and I couldn’t do it anymore.
“I asked if they were cool with me quitting and giving up the dream of ever paying rent somewhere else until further notice and just living in my room in the apartment where I grew up and just writing songs all day. They didn’t bat an eye. They said: ‘We totally understand. You should write songs. You should develop this. You need time.’ It’s something I feel very, very lucky about.”
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When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State St.
Tickets: $39-$49; 312-462-6300 or ticketmaster.com