Life After Moscow: the subway encounter that saved the sound of Regina Spektor
If you’ve become jaded against the lack of magic in the world, then look no further than Regina Spektor to inspire some hope back into your soul. The Russian-American singer is a stalwart of New York’s anti-folk scene and quickly became synonymous with a sense of artistic rebellion through her seminal album Soviet Kitsch, but in many ways, she only transformed into someone so powerful in the knowledge that she could have lost everything forever.
Spektor’s story began when, at just nine years old, she and her family fled their native Moscow and the Russian communist regime for American shores, landing in New York’s Bronx district. But the young musician’s fate was far from certain – long before a life of record deals and indie rapture, she was forced to leave her beloved piano behind when escaping the country and didn’t know how and if she would continue learning.
She recalled in a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose: “It was really the only thing holding my parents back when they wanted to immigrate to America, knowing that I probably wouldn’t learn music anymore, […] because you had to pay for music education, and nobody spoke the language, and they really didn’t know what kind of life we were going to have here.”
Set against this bleakest of backdrops, however, it was one sliding doors encounter from Spektor’s father, coming home from work on the subway in the family’s new city, that ended up saving his daughter’s musical trajectory. The singer continued: “There was a man on the train who was older, and he had a violin case next to him – my dad had played the violin. They started a conversation because my dad is very much a people’s person, and the man invited us all to him and his wife’s house to hear some classical music being played because my dad mentioned that we hadn’t heard concerts in a long time.”
These unlikely heroes, Samuel Marder and his wife, Sonia Vargas, became Spektor’s musical saviours as she recalled: “When I went to their house, I asked her [Vargas] to be my teacher and she said, ‘Of course’. That’s really the reason that I was able to study music from the age of ten and onwards and have the skills.”
With the foundational techniques of the classical canon in place, over time Spektor began to find her own voice beyond the piano and genre itself, branching out into other areas such as hip-hop, rock, and punk. This was what ultimately led her down the track of beginning to pen her own songs – and with the eventual breakthrough success of Soviet Kitsch some roughly 15 years after first landing in America, she well and truly never looked back.
While highlighting the timely and indisputable value of music education, Spektor’s story really does restore one’s faith in the universe that things will always work out as they should. If her father and the violinist had never had their chance conversation in the subway carriage, the music world might never have witnessed one of its fieriest anti-establishment voices, and the kitschy scene may never have revelled in Spektor’s unparalleled, eclectic sound. The moral of the story? Always catch the train.
