Viva Regina.

Hotels. Pickles. Stretchmarks. These are just three things that inspire Regina Spektor, the Russian-American musician who writes, sings, plays the piano, plays the guitar and is an all-round entertainer and artist of the highest calibre. I was reading through an issue of my school’s magazine from over a year ago, in which there was an article about the author’s favourite Regina Spektor songs, so I thought I’d do the same!

Born in Moscow on February 18th, her parents instilled a musical sense into her from an early age. Her dad, Ilya Spektor, was an amateur violinist, and her mum was a music teacher. She practiced the piano on a Petrof that was passed down from her granddad. Unfortunately, when her family emigrated from the USSR due to discrimination against the Jewish, the piano was left behind. No problem for Regina – she practiced the fingerings on windowsills until her family could afford to buy her another. And it’s a ruddy good thing she did, because she’s blossomed into one of the best artists around; her songs are deep, poetic, funny, sad, and have some of the most original lyrics I’ve ever heard.

So here are my top 10 Regina Spektor songs:
10. Pavlov’s Daughter
The grave diggers getting stuck in the machine
picking getting slim, slimmer
I hear them say my name
regin-ah, regin-ah, regin-a-ah

Absolutely adore this song, it’s one of the strangest I’ve heard, and definitely one of Regina’s most sinister. Word of warning, though, play it loud, and, getting to the “regin-a-ah” bit sounds a bit like a woman having an orgasm.

09. Buildings
Sifts through its sift
Just sifts through its sift
Oh, Oh ooooo
Sifts through its sift
Just sifts through its sift

Like most Regina Spektor songs, a really tricky one to interrupt. I think it could be about a couple in love, but the woman drifting away from the man through her depression.

08. Apres Moi
Be afraid of the lame, they'll inherit your legs
Be afraid of the old, they'll inherit your souls
Be afraid of the cold, they'll inherit your blood
Apres moi le deluge, after me comes the flood

She sings a bit of Russian in this one!

07. Poor Little Rich Boy
Poor little rich boy, all the world is okay
The water runs off your skin and down into the drain
You’re reading Fitzgerald, you’re reading Hemmingway
They’re both super smart and drinking in the cafés

Always reminds me a bit of The Catcher in the Rye, for some reason.

06. Oedipus
I'm the king's thirty second son
Born to him in thirty second's time
Born to him the night still young
Born to him with two eyebrows on
And that's all I was wearing
When I woke up staring at the world

One of Regina’s most vocally strong songs, this, like Samson, alludes to a well-known story – here, of Oedipus Rex, and builds a truly powerful song from a myth. One to make you sit up and think.

05. Chelsea Hotel #2
I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can't keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
that's all, I don't even think of you that often.

This is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel, and Regina sings it so, so well. His poetry + her voice = Heaven.

04. Real Love
Don't need to be alone
No need to be alone
It's real love
Yes, it's real love
Oh, it's real love
Yes, it's real love

Another cover, this time, of John Lennon. Regina’s voice & piano playing in this song are just sublime, she captures the emotional lines perfectly.

03. Braille
Elvis never could carry a tune
and she thought about this irony as she stared back at the moon
She was tracing her years with her fingers on her skin saying,
Well, why don't I begin again

My choice for Regina Spektor’s most haunting song, Braille takes us through the life of a financially struggling single mother and her son named Elvis. The piano-playing in the intro is brilliant here, I still get shivers every time I hear it.

02. Love Affair
There was a love affair in this building,
The kind of love affair that every respectable building must, keep as a legend.

This song demonstrates that Regina is not so much a songwriter as a storyteller too. Here, it is a fairly simple story of a man and woman in a building who meet and have a love affair. Listen to Regina’s warble on the line “mothers prefer doctors and law-aw-ars.” Incredible.

01. Samson

I loved you first, I loved you first.

Beneath these sheets of paper lies my truth.

Quite simply, the most beautiful song every written. I’m one of the few who prefer the faster version of this, but the lyrics that run through both are so beautiful, it breaks my heart. I connect with it completely, and I think everyone who’s ever felt love towards someone or something, and lost it, will do so too.

Samson, set to some clips from Brokeback Mountain. Omg, so beautiful.


So. What are your favourite Regina Spektor songs?

Fireworks at Lake Michigan.

Three books today, two novellas and a longer book.

The two novellas were:
Kill Swap (James Lovegrove)
Despite being only about 60 pages in length, I really got a lot out of this book. It started with what seemed to be a Strangers on a Train-type plot – a boy, whose dad is being hounded by an uncompromising loan shark, agrees to kill a banker in the city he doesn’t know in return for the loan shark getting killed by someone else. But then the twists kick in. The problem with the short length of the novel is that we don’t really get given time to feel for the lad at the centre of it all – we get that he feels guilty, but he literally dwells over it for about three lines. That said, I really enjoyed it and thought it was very clever, particularly the nice bit of revenge at the end.

Fame Thing (Jonathan Meres)
This is about a football-mad teenage girl, George, who befriends the footballer that has just moved into her town, despite everyone else thinking he’s “bad news.” Completely unrealistic and predictable from start to finish (George is in a wheelchair, and as soon as the footballer’s agent sees her in a wheelchair you can just work out that he wants to get the two together cos it’s good PR), though it had some nice domestic scenes between George and her brother, as well as George and her best friend Nick. Overall though, I think the book couldn’t decide what it wanted to be – a comment on the state of the media (which Kill Swap did terrifically), the story of a teenage girl getting hormones, or a warning about the dangers of being too successful too quickly. In the end, it didn’t achieve any of those things.

And the book I read was:

The Mathematics of Love (Emma Darwin)
Reading this is becoming somewhat of a Summertime ritual now, though at times, it’s anything but a sunny read. The Mathematics of Love follows Stephen Fairhust, a Major returned from the brutality of Wellington's Peninsular War and Anna Ware, a 15 year old girl whose been fobbed off by her irresponsible mother, forced to live with her uncle and drunken grandmother in a dilapidated ex-school. Both experience love, though it’s far from without it’s tribulations. Stephen writes letters to Miss Durward, and, 150 years later, these letters are read by Anna, linking our two protagonists together.

Although it does take some getting into and not much seems to occur at first, every line was beautifully formed. I definitely preferred Stephen to Anna; some petulant streaks to Anna’s personality rendered her very dislikeable to me to begin with, but towards the end, I grew to respect her. I thought the way Darwin presented the relationship Anna pursued with an older man, photographer Theo, as well as the third person in their relationship Eva, was terrific, so, for that, I kind of preferred the modern strand more. Ooh, and I cried for poor Cecil. :( Overall, I really, really enjoyed this book.

A Book A Day...

The Lovely Bones.

I was so busy celebrating the end of the exams that I nearly forgot to read, which would have been quite a crap way to start the “A book a day” campaign!

Anyway. Today, I opted for a book I’ve read before and didn’t love – critical darling The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - to see whether my opinion of it would change in time for the 2009 release of the Peter Jackson directed film.

Right, well, where to start? Loved the cover picture, of the charm bracelet, hated just about everything else. The premise was fairly OK – dead girl caught in limbo between earth and heaven and looking down, but the execution just didn’t carry off. I didn’t like the detached writing style (though I do think it suited the novel), I wasn’t able to sympathise for any of the characters (I wasn’t convinced by some of the character’s “grief” – a mother that cheats following her daughter’s death is a little too pat, imo), and most of all, I got a really horrible feeling that Sebold took a grim sort of pleasure in describing Susie’s rape and murder, as well all of the other murder victims. She just kept going into all the detail, whilst trying to write in this classy way. Eww. Some critics said it was beautiful and uplifting, and whilst I wasn’t depressed by it or anything, it was definitely anything but beautiful. Rather, I thought it was kinda self-indulgent and turgid. Overall, I just thought it was a bit of a waste of time.

Saoirse Ronan says she hasn’t read the book yet. Let’s hope it stays that way.

The verdict:

^^ that was a naff review, I know, but I really do feel it was quite a naff book. I was “meh” following my first reading of it, but now I really dislike it.

A book a day keeps the anxiety away.

I am mesmerized by this image

First thing to do when I've finished exams - see Priceless!

Beautiful!