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About Regina Spektor

Regina Spektor is a Russian-born American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered on New York City’s East Village.

Spektor was born in Moscow, Russia, USSR to a musical Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, a photographer, was also an amateur violinist. Her mother was a music professor in a Russian college of music, and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.

Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Unfortunately, Regina had to leave her piano behind. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination, with which Jews were faced.

Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the family settled in the Bronx, New York, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a middle school yeshiva in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She then attended high school for two years on a scholarship at the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, but, feeling out of place, eventually transferred to a secular public school, Fair Lawn High School, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last two years of her high school career.

In New York, Spektor gained a firm grounding in classical music from her piano teacher, Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music. Spektor studied with Vargas—whom Spektor’s father had met through violinist Samuel Marder, Vargas’s husband—until she was 17. Although the family had been unable to bring their piano with them from Russia, Spektor found a piano on which to practice in the basement of her synagogue, also utilizing tabletops and other hard surfaces for this purpose.

Although she had always made up songs around the house, Spektor first became interested in songwriting during a visit to Israel with the Nesiya Institute in her teenage years. Attracting attention from the other children on the trip for the songs she made up while hiking, she realized she had an aptitude for songwriting. Following this trip, she was first exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, and other singer-songwriters, which gave her the idea that she could create her own songs. She began writing her first a cappella songs around age sixteen, and wrote her first songs for voice and piano when she was nearly eighteen.

Spektor completed the four-year studio composition program of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in Purchase, New York within three years, graduating with honors in 2001. Around this time, she also worked briefly at a butterfly farm in Luck, Wisconsin, and studied in Tottenham, England for one semester.

She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, most importantly at the East Village’s Sidewalk Cafe, but also at the Living Room, Tonic, Fez, the Knitting Factory, and CB’s Gallery. During this period, she sold her self-produced CDs 11:11 (2001) and Songs (2002) at such performances.

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