Song Review: Love according to Regina Spektor

A dark and moving ballad about everyone’s favorite topic, love, “Samson” is often associated with his female counterpart Delilah. Sexy, seductive, gorgeous yet a devil in a disguise cuts Samson’s long tresses and he loses the very power that brought him fame. “Your hair was long when we first met,” Regina sings with love and sadness.

Regina 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. Regina 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 a Perestroika when Jewish 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 Russia, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination with which Jews were faced.

Spektor received increased attention in 2006 when her video for “Fidelity” was viewed over 200,000 times in two days on YouTube on SIRIUS Radio’s Left of Center channel; her single “Fidelity” was voted by listeners as the #1 song of 2006. Towards the end of 2006, VHI showcased her as part of their “You Oughta Know: Artists on the Rise” featurettes: they played clips from the “Fidelity” music video and showed parts of an interview with Spektor during commercial breaks on the channel 2.  Regina was recently named #3 on VH1’s Top Artists Charts.

She truly manifests ease when hitting the high notes with her hypnotizing alto voice and pure talent as a schooled pianist. A famous artist once said “Learn an instrument” to hone your craft and love for music.

In the song, the lyrics that truly moved me was: “You are my sweetest downfall, I loved you first, I loved you first.” For me this simply means that we are all in search of love but more importantly to be loved. Sadly, we tend to look for love in all the wrong places and in the wrong person because we are blinded. We want something real and we want to grasp the moment for as long as we can. Sometimes it is fleeting and if we are lucky enough it stays. Loss is inevitable and pain will always be there, what truly matters are the persons who made our lives worth living in the first place. The song could later prove to be shrouded with sadness but a flicker of hope remains—the chance for us to pick ourselves up and move on.