Regina Spektor came to the College Street Music Hall on October 15 to promote her new album, Remember Us to Life. Concert-goers were lucky to catch her in one of only two U.S. cities on her world tour itinerary. News of Regina’s arrival was eagerly received—tickets sold out minutes after they were posted. The house’s five-minute standing ovation before the encore was a testament to her stunning performance.
Remember Us to Life, an expression borrowed from Jewish liturgy, is a title well-suited to the album’s themes. Much of the Spektor’s verse is concerned with the wisdom that ferments in time’s stomach. In “Older and Taller,” Spektor explores the ways in which old friends and choices can assume new (and often unwieldy) shapes when recalled from a distance, in hindsight. The song registers as an admonition for time wasted and as a note of defiance. Spektor sounds knowing and playful in the swinging melody as she sings, “You were about to be fired / for being so tired from hearing the ones / who will take your place.” Later on, she proclaims, “Enjoy your youth / sounds like a threat / but I will anyway.” This second verse is a resistance to structures that divest people of their personal identities—structures in which people seamlessly “take [each other’s] place” and experience life as drudgery. “I’m here,” Regina told the audience at one point in the show, perched on her piano bench. “I’m just so here.”
When I first heard Spektor’s music in high school, her defiance and whimsy immediately endeared her to me. Songs like “Dance Anthem of the Eighties” and “The Hotel Song” (from What We Saw from the Cheap Seats and Begin to Hope, respectively), offering snapshots of lusty children mingling in meat markets and of hazily-imagined orca whales, delighted me with their outlandishness. These songs were relatable as well as lyrically and melodically deviant. I loved that. I was initially uncertain about Remember Us to Life while listening to it in the weeks before the concert, feeling that, in places, it exchanged the bold quirk of its predecessors for mawkishness. While some of those reservations remain, Spektor’s soulful and animated delivery during the concert made me a more enthusiastic listener.
Though Spektor didn’t talk at length between songs, her occasional quips were memorably—and characteristically—strange. “My shirt matches the exit signs,” she marveled, gazing at the back of the room. She dreamily ran her fingers through a beam of light and mused about the taste of just-brushed teeth. Spektor has a magic about her with many different gradations: righteous indignation, idealism, kabbalism (or is it cannibalism?). And, of course, weirdness—the good kind.