Regina Spektor thinks about words differently than most of us. That much was clear Sunday at the first of a sold-out three-night stand at Thalia Hall, where the singer-songwriter literally and figuratively explored the consequence of sounds, syllables and silences at a bare-bones show bursting with accessible eclecticism and quirky perspective. Though flawed, the solo outing possessed the courage to fail and put a refreshing spin on the tired “album-play” concept.
Looking back at her younger self while combing through songs she made before she landed a record deal, Spektor offered fans a candid view into her origins for the first hour of the 105-minute concert. The decision proved rare and unguarded. Most contemporaries either reserve proto-fare for polished, late-career archival projects or leave it locked away in a vault.
Shy only in the matter of blowing her nose due to a minor cold, the 45-year-old Russian native greeted the challenge with gregarious charm, honesty and huge smiles. She appeared shocked that the audience embraced material she described as “super weird” and never thought would be heard in her adopted hometown of New York, let alone Chicago. Spektor asked for forgiveness in advance, knowing she’d probably lose the thread at least once on tunes that stem back to her days as a teenager.
Indeed, amid an age where countless musicians capitalize on nostalgia by replicating widely known albums in their entirety onstage, Spektor’s deep dive felt brave and unique. On a tour that visited just three cities, she begins by playing her “Songs” record in an order that doesn’t usually mirror the original sequence.
Granted access to a friend’s recording studio on Christmas Day 2001, Spektor completed the album in one take. Technically released in 2002 and sold only at her shows, the self-issued effort soon faded away to become a kind of aural curio. Renowned engineer Bob Ludwig came out of retirement to master it for proper release and its streaming debut last November.
Long removed from the days of hawking $10 CDs of “Songs” out of a backpack, Spektor spent the past 20 or so years charting a course that positions her as one of the most “indie” artists remaining on a major-label roster. Prevented from greater fame mainly because of the eccentricities that fuel her ingenuity, she exists as a throwback to when big labels would still weigh the importance of craftsmanship and originality against the desire for massive sales.
Having throttled back her professional schedule over the last decade, Spektor now seems more of an outlier than ever. Her consistently strong output — including two self-released efforts, six studio records, a live outing and several contributions to high-profile soundtracks — and slowed pace suggest the approach of a musician who does things on her own terms.
Wearing a shiny dress and vibrant red lipstick, and primarily seated at a grand piano, Spektor followed her own muse at the Pilsen venue. Even, at times, reluctantly, as with certain “Songs” tracks, she regretted writing too many words and devising an abundance of chords. Off-the-cuff and borderline giddy, her self-reflections provided comedic relief and contextual background. At one point, while wrestling with her youthful compositions, Spektor acknowledged their erratic nature and joked she shouldn’t have to face her past self.
Witnessing the singer-pianist examine her roots without the aid of edits, accompaniment or technology was fascinating and insightful. Spektor’s agile vocals and clever lyrics supplied plenty of reasons to grant her latitude. Even when she navigated songs that resembled half-finished sketches (“Lulliby”). Or recited the ingredients of a fruit jar (“Reading Time with Pickle”), made false starts (“Aching to Pupate”) and furiously hunted for the right piano notes after flubbing a transition and bringing everything to a full stop (“Lacrimosa”).
Could Spektor benefit from better preparation? Sure, though refinement and stuffed-shirt professionalism would’ve smoothed the rough edges of offbeat songs that thrived on spontaneity, uncertainty and whimsy. Working from memory, and dealing with the awkward consequences when it failed, the singer equated her vulnerable interpretations of the zig-zagging pieces to riding a roller coaster without a safety harness.
Aptly, Spektor’s elastic voice and tempo command supplied an endless path of twists, loops, dips, rolls, stalls, spirals and drops. She expanded traditional pop parameters with architecture that frequently changed direction without notice and, once the detours were mapped, reverted to the initial patterns just as quickly. Her malleable piano arrangements reconceptualized lullabies, ballads, shuffles and torch songs.
Demonstrated on the casual “Bobbing for Apples” and rubbery “That Time” — examples of her flair for observation and ability to express significant themes couched in narratives that otherwise appear to address routine matters — Spektor’s crude guitar strumming served as a weak substitute for her keyboard prowess. She handled basic percussion, such as whacking a drum stick against a wooden chair on the scolding “Poor Little Rich Boy” or tapping her hand on the piano lid during a surprisingly solemn “Better,” with more authority.
Nothing outshined what Spektor accomplished with her voice. Especially evident on five songs stripped of their wider-scale pop-rock instrumentation, her varied deliveries transformed vowels, consonants, pitches and accents into a novel language. She played games of hop-scotch with pronunciation devices, stretched short phrases into lengthy passages, dangled notes akin to the way a puppeteer controls strings from above.
Limited only by possibility, Spektor used her dynamic voice to mimic the tooting of car horns; soft shimmering of hi-hat cymbals; frustrations of muttered curses; rhythms of a hip-hop beat; airiness of pursed lips; praise retching of sudden nausea. Whether adhering to gentle tones, firing off sentences as rapid-fire streams, inventing mashed-up terms, rapping cadences or employing subtle shifts in volume to alter meaning, she created colorful universes stitched together by zany imagination, escapist fantasy and grown-up romanticism.
May her innocent sense of child-like wonder never dim.
Bob Gendron is a freelance critic.
Setlist from Thalia Hall March 2:
“Prisoners”
“Reading Time with Pickle”
“Oedipus”
“Bon Idée”
“Aching to Pupate”
“Lounge”
“Daniel Cowman”
“Lacrimosa”
“Consequence of Sounds”
“Lulliby”
“Samson”
“Ne Me Quitte Pas”
“Loveology”
“Baby Jesus”
“Two Birds”
“Aquarius”
“Better”
“Bobbing for Apples”
“That Time”
Encore
“Poor Little Rich Boy”
“Fidelity”
